Maverick Philosopher

Michael Walzer on Religion

At least one lefty gets it, somewhat. Top o' the Stack.

A Love of Life Inordinate and Idolatrous?

The case of Susan Sontag. 

Top o' the Stack.

The Greatest Temptation

Resist it.

A Love of Life Inordinate and Idolatrous?

Dying of cancer, Susan Sontag raged against the dying of the light, hoping for a cure. "If only my mother hadn't hoped so much." (David Rieff, Swimming in a Sea of Death, Simon and Shuster, 2008, 139.) Hers was a false hope, one fueled by an inordinate and idolatrous love of life: ". . . my mother could not get enough of being alive, she reveled in being; it was as straightforward as that." (143) But this being was the being of a sick mortal human animal soon slated for destruction. And so the question arises: is an attitude toward life like that of Sontag excessive and idolatrous? Is it not absurd to attach an absolute value to something so transient and miserable?

There are inordinate loves in this life — of wine and travel, loot and land — and there is the inordinate love of life itself, this life, mortal life, life that ends utterly with the death of the body after a short span of years. That is the case of Susan Sontag, secularist. Convinced that this is it, she had no belief in a life beyond this mortal life.

The horrors of this world strike many as an argument against its value, and in the case of such anti-natalists as David Benatar, the horrors speak against the morality of human procreation. But the horrendous evils of this life did nothing to dampen Sontag's vital enthusiasm. "She thought the world a charnel house . . . and couldn't get enough of it. ". . . my mother simply could not get her fill of the world." (149) She thought herself unhappy . . .  and wanted to live, unhappy, for as long as she possibly could." (147) And ". . . how profoundly she had been unhappy." 

She lived in and for the future because she was unhappy in the present. ". . . my sense is that she had always lived in the future . . . and yet surely the only way to even remotely come to terms with death is to live in the present." (19-20) Sontag couldn't be here now and abide in the present. She lived for a future that must, she believed, lead in a short time to her extinction.

Was Sontag's attitude toward and valuation of life reasonable? You might retort that reason doesn't come into it: the love of life is irrational! Yet Sontag was science-based and had utter contempt for the false hopes and cancer 'cures' peddled by her New Age friends. Secular to the core, religion for her was but a tissue of superstitions.  She was too rational for religion but not so rational as to see the absurdity of attaching an infinite value to her miserable life.

Rieff quotes Marguerite Duras: "I cannot reconcile myself to being nothing." And then he quotes his mother: "Death is unbearable unless you can get beyond the 'I'." "But she who could do so many things in her life could never do that." Rieff thinks his mother "the very incarnation of hope." (167) 

I'd say her hope was a false hope, false because baseless and irrational.  An absurd hope, absurd because an unquenchable love of life cannot be satisfied in a charnel house. It is perfectly plain that a mortal man, mortal because material, cannot live forever in a material world. It would be more reasonable to take one's unquenchable love of life as pointing to a fulfillment beyond this life. Why would we have this unquenchable love if we were not made for eternal life? This non-rhetorical question can be cast as an argument, not that it would be rationally coercive; it would, however, properly deployed, render rationally acceptable the belief in and hope for eternal life.

But Sontag couldn't bring herself to believe in eternal life. So she should have made friends with finitude and dismissed her excessive love of life as delusional and idolatrous.

One of the questions that arise is whether an atheist can be an idolater. I answer in the affirmative over at Substack.

Anti-Natalism Article of Mine Now in Print and Online

Vallicella, William F.. "Is the Quality of Life Objectively Evaluable on Naturalism?" Perichoresis, vol.21, no.1, 2023, pp.70-83. https://doi.org/10.2478/perc-2023-0005

Abstract

This article examines one of the sources of David Benatar’s anti-natalism. This is the view that ‘all procreation is [morally] wrong.’ (Benatar and Wasserman, 2015:12) One of its sources is the claim that each of our lives is objectively bad, hence bad whether we think so or not. The question I will pose is whether the constraints of metaphysical naturalism allow for an objective devaluation of human life sufficiently negative to justify anti-natalism. My thesis is that metaphysical naturalism does not have the resources to support such a negative evaluation. Metaphysical naturalism is the view that causal reality is exhausted by nature, the space-time system and its contents.

The gist of my argument is that the ideal standards relative to which our lives are supposed to be axiologically substandard cannot be merely subjective expressions of our desires and aversions; they must be (i) objectively binding standards that are (ii) objectively possible in the sense of concretely realizable. The realizability condition, however, cannot be satisfied on metaphysical naturalism; ergo, failure to meet these ideal standards cannot show that our lives are objectively bad.

Keywords

• anti-natalism
• procreation
• naturalism
• metaphysical naturalism
• human life

The entire issue is available here.

The Question of the Meaning of Life

A Substack upload that clarifies the question. 

 

A Minor Correction Anent 'Absurd' with a Little Help from Mark Rothko

In a Substack entry I distinguished four senses of 'absurd,' the logico-mathematical, the semantic, the existential, and the ordinary. About the existential sense I had this to say:

3) Existential.  The absurd as the existentially meaningless, the groundless, the brute-factual, the intrinsically unintelligible.  The absurdity of existence in this sense of 'absurd' is what elicited Jean-Paul Sartre's and his character Roquentin's  nausea.  The sheer, meaningless, disgusting, facticity of the chestnut tree referenced in the eponymous novel, for example, was described by Sartre as de trop and as an unintelligible excrescence.

That's pretty good, but it leaves out an important nuance.  In "A Case in Reason for God's Existence?" Joseph Donceel, S. J. points out that it is not enough for a thing to count as absurd in what I am calling the existential sense that it be meaningless or unintelligible.  For the absurd is not simply that which makes no sense; it is that  which makes no sense, but ought to, or is supposed to.  To say that life is absurd is not merely to say that it has no point or purpose; it is to say that it fails to meet a deep and universal demand or expectation on our part that it have a point or purpose. Donceel:

No one calls decorative painting absurd, but many people feel that most modern painting is absurd, because they expect it to make sense for them, and it does not. We understand what is meant when people say of reality or of life that it does not make sense. But their claim that it is absurd implies that it should make sense, that they expect it to make sense. (God Knowable and Unknowable, ed. Roth, Fordham UP, 1973, p. 181.) 

The decadent 'art' of Mark Rothko et al., which is presumably intended to be art and not mere wall decoration or ornamentation meant to add a splash of color to an otherwise drab room, reflects the absurdist sensibility of the post-modern era. Healthy folk -- as opposed to neurotic 'transgressive' NYC hipsters -- find it absurd because it defeats their expectation that art should 'mean something' not just in the sense of representing something, but in the sense of representing something that inspires and uplifts and is beautiful in the Platonic sense that brackets (encompasses) the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.

At the opposite end of the spectrum there is kitsch, the king of which is Thomas Kinkade. Bang on the hyperlink to see samples of his work. I am not for kitsch, but I will take it over the decadent stuff. It is less fraying of the fabric of civilization. At the present time, the anti-civilizational forces are on the march and in dire need of stiff-necked opposition. But now I am straying into aesthetics about which I know little. But that doesn't stop me since, as you know, one of my mottoes is:

Nescio, ergo blogo.

First Thought of the Day

Life is a task; the world is a proving ground. First thought, best thought.

Sunday Morning Sermon: A Life Well Lived

To make good use of your time in this world, think of your life above all as a quest, a seeking, a searching, a striving.  For what?  For the ultimate in reality, truth, value, and for their existential appropriation.  

One appropriates reality by being authentic, truth by being truthful, values and norms by living them.  

It may all be absurd in the end, a "tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."  But one cannot live well on the assumption that it is.

So assume that it is not and seek the truth along all avenues of advance.

The View from Mount Zappfe

Substack latest.

How Should We Live? or The Fly Bottle Blues

Here is a possible attitude for examination.

Stick to the measurable, the calculable, and the empirically verifiable. Avoid Big Questions and Long Views. Live here, now, and to human scale. Speculation is idle. No one knows or will ever know the answers to the Big Questions. To bother one's head over the ultimate distracts from the proximate, and unfits one for the only life that is sure. Accept finitude, for we are not made for anything more.

But even this train of thought is dangerous. To ride it is already to forsake short views and to speculate fruitlessly about views and about which is best. That view alone is truly short which is accepted thoughtlessly and thus not as a view. The truly short view is no view. If you so much as ask whether the life lived in sensuous immediacy is the truest or best, the worm of inquiry  -- call him Skepsis -- has already entered your head. Or perhaps he was there all along and now you are feeding him.  

But it is too late. You are on the path of inquiry and there is no turning back. Forward you shall go to points unknown. Will you proceed resolutely or in the desultory way of wishy-washy worldlings?

But is it really too late? Why can't one just stop? The trick is to do so without explanation or justification. The example of Ludwig Wittgenstein suggests that this is impossible. Philosophical Investigations,  309:

Was ist dein Ziel in der Philosophie? Der Fliege den Ausweg aus dem Fliegenglas zeigen.

What is your goal in philosophy? To show the fly the way out of the fly glass.

Why does the bug need to be shown the way out?  Pop the cork and he's gone.

Why did Wittgenstein feel the need to philosophize his way out of philosophy?  He should have known that metaphilosophy and anti-philosophy are just more philosophy with all the inconclusiveness and endlessness that that entails. He should have just walked away from philosophy.

If the room is too smoky, there is no necessity that you remain in it.  You are free to go, the door is unlocked.  This figure's from Epictetus and he had the quitting of life in view.  But the same holds for the quitting of philosophy.  Just do it, if that's what you want.  It is not clear that it can be done, but you can try.  I'm not saying it should be done.  On the contrary.

What cannot be done, however, is to justify one's exit.  That would be like copulating your way to chastity.  For any justification proffered, perforce and willy-nilly, will be just more philosophy, and you will remain stuck within the bottle.  You cannot have it both ways.  You either walk away or stay.

Just walk away, Rene.

The Long and the Short of it

Long views or short? Substack latest.

Politics and Meaning: More on the Conservative Disadvantage

Here again is my Substack entry "The Conservative Disadvantage."  In it I wrote, "We don't look to politics for meaning. Or rather, we do not seek any transcendent meaning in the political sphere." Thomas Beale charitably comments (edited):

Just a short note on that post: your observation about meaning is  one of the most penetrating I have read for a long while -- it's one of those truths hiding in such plain sight that no one sees it. This phenomenon of the true conservative "not looking to politics for meaning" is deeper than the usual formulations according to which Marxist and other utopian ideologies are replacements for the old religions. This is because the whole question of where 'meaning' (and therefore worth) in life is found is the most fundamental question of the human condition. It's a Scruton-esque observation as well -- perhaps he even said something like this, although I don't remember it as pithily expressed as your version - - but he certainly thought that meaning for real people was in their daily lives well lived within clubs, theatres, the garden, nature.

In fact, re-reading your text, it's almost a shortest-possible definition of what it means to be (small-c) conservative by describing its negation. I particularly like the line 'A conservative could never write a book with the title, The Politics of Meaning.' 

Your characterisation of the conservative atheist I think is very nice as well.

My thanks to Thomas Beale for these kind comments.  Here are some additional remarks about meaning and the political to clarify and fill out what I wrote and perhaps ignite some discussion.

1) There is a distinction between 'existential' and  semantic meaning. Our concern here is solely with the first. There is also a distinction within existential or life meaning between ultimate and proximate meaning. When we ask philosophically about the meaning of  life we are asking about the ultimate and objective point, purpose, end, or goal of human willing and striving, if there is one.  We are asking whether there is an ultimate and objective purpose, and what it is.  Both of these questions admit of reasonable controversy. Some say that human life has no objective purpose. Any purpose it has must be subjective. Others say that it does have an objective purpose, but then disagree bitterly as to what it is. But that there are proximate and relative meanings in human lives is uncontroversial.  For one person, writing poetry is highly meaningful, for another a silly and meaningless waste of time.  

2) When I say that the conservative does not look to politics for meaning, I am referring to ultimate meaning: he does not look to politics for ultimate meaning.  One could be a conservative in my sense and find political activity proximately meaningful.  One could not be a conservative in my sense and find political activity ultimately meaningful.  For the conservative understands something that the leftist does not. He understands that  political activity cannot be our ultimate purpose because the political is not of ultimate value. This raises the question of the relation of the teleological to the axiological. The meaning-of-life question has both a teleological and an axiological side.

3) Teleological and Axiological Aspects of Existential Meaning

Teleology. Meaning bears a teleological aspect in that a meaningful life is a purpose-driven life.  It is difficult to see how a human life devoid of purposes could be meaningful, either proximately or ultimately, and indeed purposes organized by a central purpose such as advancing knowledge or alleviating suffering.  The central purpose must be one the agent freely and self-transparently chooses for himself. It cannot be one that is assigned ab extra. The central purpose must be both nontrivial and achievable.  A life devoted to the collecting of beer cans is purpose-driven but meaningless on the score of triviality while a life in quest of a perpetuum mobile is purpose-driven but meaningless on the score of futility.  But even if a life has a focal purpose that is freely and consciously chosen by the agent of the life, nontrivial, and achievable, this still does not suffice for ultimate meaningfulness.

Axiology. A meaningful life also bears an axiological aspect in that a meaningful life is one that embodies some if not a preponderance of positive non-instrumental value at least for the agent of the life.  A life wholly devoid of personal satisfaction cannot be called meaningful.  But even this is not enough.  The lives of some terrorists and mass murderers are driven by non-trivial and non-futile purposes and are satisfying to their agents.  We ought, however, to resist the notion that such lives are ultimately meaningful. A necessary condition of a life’s being ultimately meaningful is that it realize some if not a preponderance of positive non-instrumental objective value.  If so, a radically immoral life cannot be a meaningful life. Or so say I.

This might be reasonably questioned. According to David Benatar, "A meaningful life is one that transcends one's own limits and significantly impacts others or serves purposes beyond oneself." (The Human Predicament, Oxford UP, 2017, p. 18) By this definition, the lives of Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot were meaningful, as Benatar grants. (19) Well, can a radically immoral life be a meaningful life? I say No; Benatar leaves the question open:

One response is to acknowledge that wicked lives can be meaningful, but then say that we should seek only positive meaning. Another option is to say that a life is not meaningful unless its purposes or ways of transcending limits are positive, worthy, or valuable. (19)

I pack quite a lot into the concept of an ultimately meaningful human life.  Such a life is one that is purpose-driven by a central purpose that organizes and unifies various peripheral purposes; a purpose that is freely  chosen by the liver of the life as opposed to imposed from without by the State, for example; a purpose that is neither trivial nor futile, and thus achievable; a purpose that is objectively morally permissible, and beyond that, objectively the best and highest life that a human is capable of; finally, a purpose that is redemptive.  But there is no space now to expand upon this last clause.  

4) But must a conservative seek an ultimate objective meaning or purpose? No, because he might not believe that one exists.  He would not be irrational in so thinking.  David Benatar serves as a a good, perhaps the best, example.

5) I have just set the bar very high, impossibly high some will say.  As I see it, one can count oneself a conservative while rejecting the conception of an ultimately meaningful life as I have defined it. 

What one cannot do as a conservative is seek ultimate meaning in the quotidian round, in "daily lives well lived within clubs, theatres, the garden, nature" to quote Beale glossing Scruton.  There is no ultimate meaning to be found there, but then again there might not be an ultimate meaning. One would then have to take whatever meaning one could get from mundane pursuits and makes friends with finitude.

Another thing a conservative qua conservative cannot do is look for meaning where the leftist looks for it.

6) A  fundamental error of the leftist is to seek ultimate meaning where it cannot be found, namely, in the political sphere, in sociopolitical activism, in the wrong-headed and dangerously quixotic attempt to straighten "the crooked timber of humanity" (Kant) by collective human action, to bring forth the "worker's paradise," to eliminate class distinctions, to end 'racism,' and 'sexism' and 'homophobia,'  'transphobia,' and other invented bogeypersons, to end alienation and the natural hierarchy of life and spirit in all its forms, and to transform the world in such a way that all meta-physical and religious yearnings for Transcendence are finally squelched and eradicated,  and to do so no matter how many 'eggs' have to be broken to achieve  the unachievable 'omelet.'

The leftist rightly sneers at mere bourgeois self-indulgence, material acquisition for its own sake, status-seeking, pleasure-seeking however refined, the 'lifestyles of the rich and famous,' etc. We conservatives who seek the true Transcendence can agree with leftists about that. But we reject their destructively cockamamie schemes and say to them: better the bourgeois life, or even the life of Nietzsche's Last Man, than your mad pursuit of the unattainable.

7) As for The Politics of Meaning, that is an actual title of a book by a pal of Hillary Clinton, Michael Lerner. It came out in 1996.  I wasn't referring to it specifically but mocking the notion that existential meaning worth attaining could be attained by political means.

Nietzsche, Salvation, and the Question of the Value of Life

Substack latest.

Do You Value This Life? How Much?

It is the hour of death.  You are informed by an utterly reliable source that you have exactly two options.  You can either accept death and with it utter annihilation of the self, or you can repeat your life with every last detail the same.  But if every last detail is to be the same, and you decide to sign up for another round on the wheel of becoming, you realize that you are signing up for an infinity of rounds.

So which will it be?  Has your life been so valuable that you would be willing to repeat it, and indeed repeat it endlessly? Noch einmal? If you say yes, you are at the upper limit of life affirmation. For me, once is enough. Up or out! This life has point only as prelude. The wheel of samsara is  the wheel of Ixion, and an eternity of re-turning is a shabby and indeed horrifying substitute for true eternity.

Nietzsche was a genuine instance of homo religiosus, but possessing as he did the bladed intellect of the skeptic, he could not bring himself to believe.

Practical Types

Practical types look down on speculation, but we are not just animals with stomachs. We have eyes and not just in the head. Mundane grubbing and hassling for property and pelf are  necessary but if not kept within limits will dim spiritual sight. We are not here to pile up loot and land.

The Platonist and the Hedonist

I am a Platonist (broadly speaking), but here I give the floor to the hedonist. The true philosopher aims to examine every side of every issue. He is, qua philosopher, no ideologue and no dogmatist. 

Platonist: You pursue paltry pleasures that cannot last and cannot ultimately satisfy. 

Hedonist: You  pursue objects lofty and lasting, but with no assurance that they exist. I have all the assurance I need, that of the senses.  The sensuous pleasures I attain I can repeat, and in that repetition I have the sign and seal of their reality. The real is repeatable.

You claim to have been vouchsafed intimations of the  Absolute and glimpses behind the veil, but can you repeat those experiences? Do others have them? If few have had them, and those few only a few times in their lives, does that not support the view that those experiences, real as experiences, yet lack reality-reference? No experience proves anything. One man's revelation is another's random neuronal swerve or brain fart.

I grant you that the pleasure of orgasm, the keenest of the fleshly pleasures, is fleeting and that no instance of such pleasure is equipped to put an end to sexual desire. No orgasm is finally satisfactory. One is left hankering for a repeat performance.  One literally itches for more. And what is true of orgasm is true of the less commanding allurements of the flesh.  I will also grant you that no series of repetitions, no matter how  protracted, can render us satisfied in full.  I am even inclined to grant you that one is seduced into an infinite process, a sort of Hegelian bad infinity, that could be called addiction.

Why waste your life on illusions like a monk in a monastery when you could live life to the full, a life that is as real as it gets? Why do you suppose impermanence is an index of unreality and lack of value?

Religion as Morality and as Metaphysics

I can't shake the thought that something is at stake in life. I cannot throw off the moral point of view. It addresses us from Elsewhere and calls us insistently to a Higher Life. It matters how we live. And this despite our being miserable bits of the Earth's fauna. This mattering cannot be a matter of the here and now alone. The moral life is ultimately meaningful only in a theological setting. There has to be a Ground of morality with the power to effect a final adjustment of virtue to happiness beyond the grave.  And we have to be more than these miserably indigent bits of the Earth's fauna. None of this obvious, of course, and will remain forever in dispute, or at least until such time as we are replaced by robots.

While  the appeal of religion as morality is strong, and such metaphysics as must be presupposed to make sense of religion as morality, I cannot say the same about the appeal of religion as systematic metaphysics. It is difficult to understand, let alone believe, such doctrines as that of the Trinity and the Incarnation, let alone those more specific doctrines of Ascension, Assumption, Virgin Birth, Immaculate Conception, and Transubstantiation.

The discursive intellect is flummoxed by such teachings.  (But it is also keenly stimulated by them, a topic for another occasion.)

But in the end, which is more important: orthodoxy or orthopraxy?  The latter.  Better to practice compassion than to write a book about it.

Morality needs a metaphysical underpinning, but must such an underpinning be rationally transparent to us? And if it cannot be rendered rationally transparent, how much ought that bother us?  Not so much that it causes us to stop living by the Ten Commandments and avoiding the Seven Deadly Sins. 

You will never be able to prove the immortality of the soul, but it is well within your power to live in such a way as to be worthy of it.  So live and you live well, no matter what the outcome. If death should prove to be annihilation of body and soul, what have you lost?

Why am I so Happy?

 

Every day there are multiple outrages from the Left as my country turns into a police state. Why should I be happy?

 

Well, I live in Arizona, a destination state if ever there was one, and I have lived here for going on 22 years. Today is another one of those exquisitely beautiful, halcyon, February days in the Sonoran desert. I am sitting here, windows open, shirt off.  My work is going well. My health is good. I enjoy the bliss and security of obscurity while garnering all the recognition I need. I take delight in my wife, and she in me. I have everything I could possibly want materially speaking. I am reaping the benefits of a lifetime of Italian frugality. Each day is my own. The consolations of philosophy are mine. The owl of Minerva is my friend. As dusk descends, he spreads his wings, sheltering me.  More than a consolation, philosophy and the life of the mind remain a reliable source of joy. Boethius wrote philosophy in prison, but I have reason to believe that I won't be tested in that way.  Old age is on my side. The clock is running, the format is sudden death, and though the time control is unknown, I have reason to believe that the flag will fall before a Boethian fate befalls me.

 

Most importantly, I believe that, after our brief sublunary tenure, we continue on as individuals in some way that, from this side, must remain mainly a matter of faith and speculation.  What we do now is meaningful because there is something like a future for us.  To live well we must not only hope within this life but also hope beyond it. If you believe that death spells the utter end of the individual, then I will ask you: whence the meaning of your life? Are you really fulfilled by the little meanings of the quotidian round?  Are you satisfied by yet another repetition of a paltry pleasure, a further concupiscent twitch, another unneeded material possession, one more uptick in your net worth?   Is hitting a little white ball into a hole enough to make you happy?  

On Wasting Time with Philosophy (with a Jab at Pascal)

People talk glibly about wasting time on this, that, and the other thing — but without reflecting on what it is to waste time. People think they know which activities are time-wasters, philosophy for example. But to know what wastes time, one would have to know what is a good, a non-wasteful, use of time. And one would presumably also have to know that one ought to use one's time well. One uses one's time well when one uses it in pursuit of worthy ends. But which ends are worthy? Does this question have an answer? Does it even make sense? And if it does, what sense does it make? And what is the answer? Now these are all philosophical questions.

Someone who holds that philosophy is a waste of time must therefore hold that these questions are a waste of time. He must simply and dogmatically assume answers to them. He must assume that the question about choice-worthy ends makes sense and has an answer. And he must assume that he has the answer. He must assume that he knows, for example, that piling up consumer goods, or chasing after name and fame, is the purpose of human existence. Or he must assume that getting to heaven, or bringing down capitalism, or 'helping other people,' is the purpose of human existence.

What's more, he who holds that philosophy is a waste of time must uncritically assume that those who give a different answer are simply wrong. And that involves a further unexamined assumption, namely, that one's own faculties are immeasurably superior to those of others. It is as if one thinks to oneself, "I am so well-endowed that I just know, without inquiry or self-examination, which ends are choice-worthy." Or one uncritically assumes that one's culture knows, or one's religion.

A thoughtful person, therefore, cannot dismiss philosophy as a waste of time. But Pascal was a thoughtful person, and didn't he dismiss philosophy as a waste of time? "Not worth an hour's trouble," he said with Descartes in his sights.

Pascal wrote a big fat book of Pensées  — and a magnificent book it was. But why did he bother if philosophy is not worth an hour's trouble? Because he made an exception in his own case: his philosophy, he felt, was different! Well, all philosophers feel that way. All feel themselves to be questing for the truth as for something precious, even when they, like Nietzsche, perversely deny truth. None feel themselves to be engaged in 'empty speculation' or 'mental masturbation' or 'meaningless abstraction.'

And if Pascal really believed that philosophy was a waste of time, why did he scribble, scribble, scribble? Why didn't he spend all his time in religious observances and mathematical studies? One might put a similar question to other philosophizing denigrators of reason such as that prodigious literary engine, Kierkegaard.

The consistently thoughtful, therefore, cannot dismiss philosophy as a waste of time. Its questions are inevitable, and one who does not find them so merely betrays his incapacity. But although philosophy raises questions, it is not very good at answering them. It is much better at questioning answers than at answering questions. And herein lies the rub of our strange predicament.

If we are thoughtful, we see that we cannot live blindly, thoughtlessly, dogmatically, accepting this and rejecting that without ever attempting to give an account of our reasons for and against. But when we set about to give our reasons we find the task daunting and interminable and not at all  generative of consensus. What is to be done?

Since there is no going back to doxastic naivete, I have nothing better to say than that we should blunder on in quest of a light that may one day dawn. The quest itself is worthwhile whatever the upshot. I closed this morning's meditation session in the way I have closed many such a session, with a renewal of vows: I dedicate my life to the ultimate truth, the ultimate light, the ultimate insight. And if death ends it all? And nothing s revealed? Then so be it.

The quest itself suffices whatever the upshot. In the end, and at last, this world has nothing to offer us compared to what the quest promises us.

People talk glibly about wasting time on this, that, and the other thing — but without reflecting on what it is to waste time. People think they know which activities are time-wasters, philosophy for example. But to know what wastes time, one would have to know what is a good, a non-wasteful, use of time. And one would presumably also have to know that one ought to use one's time well. One uses one's time well when one uses it in pursuit of worthy ends. But which ends are worthy? Does this question have an answer? Does it even make sense? And if it does, what sense does it make? And what is the answer? Now these are all philosophical questions.

Someone who holds that philosophy is a waste of time must therefore hold that these questions are a waste of time. He must simply and dogmatically assume answers to them. He must assume that the question about choice-worthy ends makes sense and has an answer. And he must assume that he has the answer. He must assume that he knows, for example, that piling up consumer goods, or chasing after name and fame, is the purpose of human existence. Or he must assume that getting to heaven, or bringing down capitalism, or 'helping other people,' is the purpose of human existence.

What's more, he who holds that philosophy is a waste of time must uncritically assume that those who give a different answer are simply wrong. And that involves a further unexamined assumption, namely, that one's own faculties are immeasurably superior to those of others. It is as if one thinks to oneself, "I am so well-endowed that I just know, without inquiry or self-examination, which ends are choice-worthy." Or one uncritically assumes that one's culture knows, or one's religion.

A thoughtful person, therefore, cannot dismiss philosophy as a waste of time. But Pascal was a thoughtful person, and didn't he dismiss philosophy as a waste of time? "Not worth an hour's trouble," he said with Descartes in his sights.

Pascal wrote a big fat book of Pensées  — and a magnificent book it was. But why did he bother if philosophy is not worth an hour's trouble? Because he made an exception in his own case: his philosophy, he felt, was different! Well, all philosophers feel that way. All feel themselves to be questing for the truth as for something precious, even when they, like Nietzsche, perversely deny truth. None feel themselves to be engaged in 'empty speculation' or 'mental masturbation' or 'meaningless abstraction.'

And if Pascal really believed that philosophy was a waste of time, why did he scribble, scribble, scribble? Why didn't he spend all his time in religious observances and mathematical studies? One might put a similar question to other philosophizing denigrators of reason such as that prodigious literary engine, Kierkegaard.

The consistently thoughtful, therefore, cannot dismiss philosophy as a waste of time. Its questions are inevitable, and one who does not find them so merely betrays his incapacity. But although philosophy raises questions, it is not very good at answering them. It is much better at questioning answers than at answering questions. And herein lies the rub of our strange predicament.

If we are thoughtful, we see that we cannot live blindly, thoughtlessly, dogmatically, accepting this and rejecting that without ever attempting to give an account of our reasons for and against. But when we set about to give our reasons we find the task daunting and interminable and not at all  generative of consensus. What is to be done?

Since there is no going back to doxastic naivete, I have nothing better to say than that we should blunder on in quest of a light that may one day dawn. The quest itself is worthwhile whatever the upshot. I closed this morning's meditation session in the way I have closed many such a session, with a renewal of vows: I dedicate my life to the ultimate truth, the ultimate light, the ultimate insight. And if death ends it all? And nothing s revealed? Then so be it.

The quest itself suffices whatever the upshot. In the end, and at last, this world has nothing to offer us compared to what the quest promises us.

Is Religion Escapist?

Escapism is a form of reality-denial.   One seeks to escape from reality into a haven of illusion.  One who flees a burning building we do not call an escapist.  Why not?   Because his escape from the fire is not an escape into unreality, but into a different reality, one decidedly superior to that of being incinerated.  The prisoner in Plato's Cave who ascended to the outer world escaped, but was not an escapist. He was not escaping from, but to, reality.

Is religion escapist?  It is an escape from the 'reality' of time and change, sin and death.  But that does not suffice to make it escapist.  It is escapist only if this life of time and change, sin and death, is all there is.  And that is precisely the question, one not to be begged.

You tell me what reality is, and I'll tell you whether religion is an escape from it. 

You say that you know what reality is? You bluster!

There is a nuance I ought to mention.  In both Platonism and Buddhism, one who has made "the ascent to what is" (Republic 521 b) and sees aright, is enjoined to  return so as to help those who remain below.  This is the return to the Cave mentioned at Republic 519 d.  In Buddhism, the Boddhisattva ideal enjoins a return of the enlightened individual to the samsaric realm to assist in the enlightenment of the sentient beings remaining there.

To return to the image of the burning building.  He who flees a burning building is no escapist: he flees an unsatisfactory predicament, one dripping with dukkha, to a more satisfactory condition.  Once there, if he is granted the courage, he reconnoiters the situation, dons fire-protective gear, and returns to save the trapped.

Both the Cave and the samsaric realm are not wholly unreal, else there would be no point to a return to them.  But they are, shall we say, ontologically and axiologically deficient.

I pity the poor secularist who believes in nothing beyond them.

Image credit. 

Is Life Good? Questioning the Question

I do not begrudge the man who exults: Life is good! For it is good for some at some times and in some places. Such a one is living and exulting, not philosophizing. He is expressing his experience of his particular life: he needn't be trying to be objective, even if he expresses himself in objective terms.  He is offering us his slant, the view from his perspective.

Nor do I begrudge the man who complains: Life is hell! A joke! A business that doesn't cover its costs! Absurd! A tale told by an idiot! A mistake! Not worth perpetuating! Wrong to perpetuate! For he too is expressing his experience of his particular life. That's the view from his perspective.  

The question that arises for the philosopher, however, is whether there is a question here that admits of an objective answer. Does it makes sense to seek a non-perspectival answer to the question whether human life is good?

The only life that can be lived is the life of the situated individual bound to his perspective. The species does not live except in a derivative sense; it is the individual that lives.  One might be tempted by the Nietzschean thought that human life cannot be objectively good or objectively bad because the quality or value of life cannot be objectively evaluated at all, either positively or negatively. As Nietzsche writes in The Twilight of the Idols, “The Problem of Socrates,”

Judgments, judgments of value, concerning life, for it or against it, can, in the end, never be true: they have value only as symptoms, they are worthy of consideration only as symptoms; in themselves such judgments are stupidities. . . .the value of life cannot be estimated. (Der Wert des Lebens nicht abgeschaetzt werden kann.) Not by the living, for they are an interested party, even a bone of contention, and not judges; not by the dead, for a different reason. For a philosopher to see a problem in the value of life is thus an objection to him, a question mark concerning his wisdom, an un-wisdom. Indeed? All these great wise men -- they were not only decadents but not wise at all?¹

As I read Nietzsche, he is telling us that life is in every case an individual's life. There is no human life in general and no fact of the matter as to whether or not human life is objectively more bad than good. Judgments of the quality of life are all essentially subjective, reflecting as they do nothing more than the quality of the particular life that is doing the judging. The negative evaluations of the weak and decadent are merely symptoms of their weakness and decadence. And similarly for the positive evaluations of the strong and healthy. The affirmations of the robust are not objectively true; they are merely expressions of their robustness. Life is the essentially subjective standard of all evaluation; as such it cannot be objectively evaluated. One cannot sensibly pronounce it either good or bad in general. There is nothing outside of it against which to measure it and find it wanting.

As a philosophizing gastroenterologist might say, “The quality of life depends on the liver.” Pessimism and anti-natalism are merely symptoms of physiological-cum-cultural decadence on the part of those who advance such doctrines.

.....................................

1 Kaufmann, W. ed. and tr., The Portable Nietzsche, New York: The Viking Press, 1968, p. 474)

 

Idolatry without God

"I am the Lord thy God; thou shalt not have false gods before me."

If God exists and you worship anything in his place, then that thing is a false god and you are an idolater.  But if God does not exist, and you worship anything at all, then you are also an idolater.  Or so say I. For idolatry entails worshipping something unworthy of worship, and if God (or some other Absolute such as the Plotinian One) does not exist, then nothing is worthy of worship. 

Now atheists typically pride themselves on 'going one god further.'  Thus they typically say to the Christian,  "You reject all gods but the Christian god; we just go one god further." So, consistently with his atheism, an atheist cannot worship anything without falling into idolatry.  He cannot esteem anything absolutely. If he makes a clean sweep with respect to all gods, then he cannot make a god of sex, power, money, science, the Enlightenment, the state, the withering away of the state, the worker's paradise, the atheist agenda, nature, the revolution, humanity, himself, his mortal beloved, not to mention golf and Eric Clapton.

A consistent atheism, one that eschews all gods, may prove to be  a difficult row to hoe.  The atheist will be sorely tempted to fall into idolatry, making a god of nature, for example, as some environmentalists do, or of science, or of the Enlightenment project, or of the 'crusade' against Christianity or religion generally.  If there is no Absolute, then nothing may be legitimately viewed as absolute. Our atheist must also avoid nihilism, the denial of value to everything. The atheist must find meaning in a world in which nothing is absolute, nothing holy, nothing worthy of total commitment or ultimate concern.  Nice work if you can get it.

Can one live a meaningful life without God and without idols?  Without an Absolute and without illicitly absolutizing anything relative?  I doubt it.  I suspect the atheist must fall into some sort of idolatry and end up worshipping nature or the state or the defeat of superstition or something else obviously unworthy of worship.  Why must he? Because we are all naturally inclined to find life worth living in pursuit of values that transcend us, values that are not transient, contingent, and parasitic on our flickering wishes and desires. Thus I conjecture that atheists and metaphysical naturalists who do not succumb to nihilism live in a state of self-deception in which they attach absolute value to things that their theory tells them cannot have absolute value.  Perhaps they should acquiesce in the nihilism of Nietzsche's Last Man.

Can an atheist live life to the full, keeping up the strenuous mood, falling neither into idolatry nor into nihilism? William James (1842-1910) would, I think, demur.  In  "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life," we read:

The capacity of the strenuous mood lies so deep down among our natural human possibilities that even if there were no metaphysical or traditional grounds for believing in a God, men would postulate one simply as a pretext for living hard, and getting out of the game of existence its keenest possibilities of zest.

Buddhism, Suffering, and One Reason I am not a Buddhist

(This entry touches upon some themes discussed with greater rigor, thoroughness, and scholarliness in my "No Self? A Look at a Buddhist Argument," International Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 4 (December 2002), pp. 453-466.)

For Buddhism, all is dukkha, suffering.  All is unsatisfactory.  This, the First Noble Truth, runs contrary to ordinary modes of thinking:  doesn't life routinely offer us, besides pain and misery and disappointment, intense pleasures and deep satisfactions?  How then can it be true that all is unsatisfactory?  For the Buddhist, however, what is ordinarily taken by the unenlightened worldling  to be sukha (pleasure) is at bottom dukkha.  Why? 

Because no pleasure, mental or physical, gives permanent and plenary satisfaction.  Each satisfaction leaves us in the lurch, wanting more.  A desire satisfied is a desire entrenched. Masturbate once, and you will do it a thousand times, with the need for repetition testifying to the unsatisfactoriness of the initial satisfaction.   If it were fully satisfactory, why would you be inclined to repeat the pleasure? Each pleasure promises more that it can possibly deliver, and so refers you to the next and the next and the next, none of them finally satisfactory.  It's a sort of Hegelian schlechte Unendlichkeit, bad infinity.  Desire satisfied becomes craving, and craving is an instance of dukkha.  One becomes attached to the paltry and impermanent and one suffers when it cannot be had.  One also suffers when the satisfaction sought is achieved but revealed to be less than what one expected.

There is more to it than this, but this is the essence of it.  The thing to note is that the claim in the First Noble Truth is not the triviality that there is a lot of suffering in this life, but that life itself, as insatiable desiring and craving for what is unattainable to it, is ill, pain-inducing, profoundly unsatisfactory, and something to be escaped from if possible. It is a radical diagnosis of the human predicament, and the proposed cure is equally radical: extirpation of desire.  The problem for the Buddhist is not that some of our desires are misdirected and inordinate; the problem is desire itself.  The solution, then, is not rightly-ordered desire, as in Christianity, but the eradication of desire.  The root (radix) of suffering is desire and that root must be uprooted (e-radi-cated).  It is a radical solution.

Although Buddhism appears in some ways to be a sort of 'empirical religion' -- to hazard an oxymoron -- the claim that all is suffering involves an interpretation of our experience that goes well beyond the empirically given.  Buddhism, as a development from Hinduism, judges the given by the standard of the permanent. It brings the meta-physical or super-sensible to bear in the evaluation of the physical or sensible.   Permanence is the standard against which the  ordinary satisfactions of life are judged deficient.  Absolute permanence sets the ontological and axiological standard.  The operative presupposition is that only that which is permanent is truly real, truly important, and truly satisfactory. But if, as Buddhism also maintains, all is impermanent, then one wonders whence the standard of permanence derives its validity. If all is impermanent, and nothing has self-nature, then the standard is illusory.  If so, then we have no good reason to reject all ordinary satisfactions.

For Buddhism, the fundamental problem is suffering in the radical sense above explained, and the solution is entry into nibbana by the extirpation of desire, all desire (including even the desire for nibbana), as opposed to the moderation of desire and its redirection to worthy objects.  I question both the diagnosis and the cure.  The diagnosis is arguably faulty because arguably incoherent: it presupposes while denying the existence of an absolute ontological and axiological standard.  The cure is faulty because it issues in nihilism, as if the goal of life could be its own self-extinction.

I am talking about primitive Buddhism, that of the Pali canon.  Attention to the Mahayana would require some qualifications.

So one reason I am not a Buddhist is that I reject the doctrine of suffering.  But I also reject the doctrines of impermanence and 'no self.'  That gives me two more reasons.  These other doctrines are inseparable from the doctrine of suffering, and they, like it, have a radical meaning. It is not just that things change, but that they are in Heraclitean flux.  It is an observable fact that things change, but the nature of change cannot be 'read off' from the fact of change.  Is change Heraclitean or Aristotelian?  If the former, then everything is continuously changing; if the latter, then there are enduring substrata of change which, for a time at least, do not change: one and the same avocado is first unripe and then ripe.  Neither of these views of change is empirically obvious in the way that it is empirically obvious that there is change.

Now it is radical impermanence that underpins radical unsatisfactoriness and that also implies the doctrine of anatta, which, in Western terms, is the denial of the existence of  substances. This denial, too, is radical since it is not merely the denial that substances are permanent, but a denial that there are any substances at all. 

But I should say that I take Buddhism very seriously indeed.  It is deep and sophisticated with a rich tradition of philosophical commentary.  Apart from its mystical branch, Sufism, I cannot take Islam seriously --except as a grave threat to other religions and indeed to civilization itself.  But perhaps I have been too much influenced by Schopenhauer on this point.

Would Naturalism Make Life Easier?

If only naturalism were unmistakably and irrefutably true! A burden would be lifted: no God, no soul, no personal survival of death, an assured exit from the wheel of becoming, no fear of being judged for one’s actions. One could have a good time with a good conscience, Hefner-style. (Or one could have a murderous time like a Saddam or a Stalin.) There would be no nagging sense that one’s self-indulgent behavior might exclude one from a greater good and a higher life. If this is all there is, one could rest easy like Nietzsche’s Last Man who has "his little pleasure for the day and his little pleasure for the night."

If one knew that one were just a complex physical system, one could blow one’s brains out, fully assured that that would be the end, thus implementing an idiosyncratic understanding of "When the going gets tough, the tough get going."

Some atheists psychologize theists thusly: "You believe out of a need for comforting illusions, illusions that pander to your petty ego by promising its perpetuation." But that table can be turned: "You atheists believe as you do so as to rest easy in this life with no demands upon you except the ones that you yourself impose." Psychologizers can be psychologized just as bullshitters can be bullshat – whence it follows that not much is to be expected from either procedure.

Am I perhaps falsely assuming that a naturalist must be a moral slacker, beholden to no moral demand? Does it follow that the naturalist cannot be an idealist, cannot live and sacrifice for high and choice-worthy ideals? Well, he can try to be an idealist, and many naturalists are idealists, and as a matter of plain fact many naturalists are morally decent people, and indeed some of them are morally better people than some anti-naturalists (some theists, for example) -- but what justification could these naturalists have for maintaining the ideals and holding the values that they do maintain and hold?

Where do these ideals come from and what validates them if, at ontological bottom, it is all just "atoms in the void"? And why ought we live up to them? Where does the oughtness, the deontic pull, if you will, come from? If ideals are mere projections, whether individually or collectively, then they have precisely no ontological backing that we are bound to take seriously.

The truth may be this. People who hold a naturalistic view and deny any purpose beyond the purposes that we individually and collectively project, and yet experience their lives as meaningful and purposeful, may simply not appreciate the practical consequences of their own theory. It may be that they have not existentially appropriated or properly internalized their theory. They don't appreciate that their doctrine implies that their lives are objectively meaningless, that their moral seriousness is misguided, that their values are without backing.  They are running on the fumes of a moral tradition whose theoretical underpinning they have rejected.

If that is right, then their theory contradicts their practice, but since they either do not fully understand their theory, or do not try to live it, the contradiction remains hidden from them. If they became transparent to themselves, they would become nihilists, not necessarily in the raging punk sort of way, but in the happy-faced manner of Nietzsche's Last Man.

How Much Value Do You Attach to This Life?

The hour of death has arrived.  You are informed by an utterly reliable source that you have exactly two options.  You can either accept death and with it utter annihilation of the self, or you can repeat your life with every last detail the same.  But if every last detail is to be the same, and you decide to sign up for another round on the wheel of becoming, you realize that you are signing up for an infinity of rounds.

So which will it be?  Has your life been so valuable that you would be willing to repeat it, and indeed repeat it endlessly? 

For me, one samsaric cycle is quite enough.  "I hope never to return." (Frida Kahlo)  

The View from Mount Zappfe: The Absurdity of Human Life and Intellectual Honesty

Gisle Tangenes describes the life and ideas of a cheerfully pessimistic, mountain-climbing Norwegian existentialist, pessimist, and anti-natalist, Peter Wessel Zapffe:

Thus the ‘thousand consolatory fictions’ that deny our captivity in dying beasts, afloat on a speck of dust in the eternal void. And after all, if a godly creator is waiting in the wings, it must be akin to the Lord in The Book of Job, since it allows its breathing creations to be “tumbled and destroyed in a vast machinery of forces foreign to interests.” Asserts Zapffe: “The more a human being in his worldview approaches the goal, the hegemony of love in a moral universe, the more has he become slipshod in the light of intellectual honesty.” The only escape from this predicament should be to discontinue the human race. Though extinction by agreement is not a terribly likely scenario, that is no more than an empirical fact of public opinion; in principle, all it would require is a global consensus to reproduce below replacement rates, and in a few generations, the likening of humankind would “not be the stars or the ocean sand, but a river dwindling to nothing in the great drought.”

So if you believe in a moral world order and the ultimate hegemony of love in the midst of all this misery and apparent senselessness, if you deny our irremediable "captivity in dying beasts," (what a great line!) then you  display a lack of intellectual honesty.  Let's think about this.

The gist of Zapffe's  position as best I can make out from the fragments I have read is that our over-developed consciousness is an evolutionary fluke that makes us miserable by uselessly generating in us the conceit that we are more than animals and somehow deserving of something better than dying like an animal after some years of struggle. Giseles: "Evolution, he [Zapffe] argues, overdid its act when creating the human brain, akin to how a contemporary of the hunter, a deer misnamed the ‘Irish elk’, became moribund by its increasingly oversized antlers."  A powerful image.  The unfortunate species of deer, having evolved huge antlers for defense, cannot carry their weight and dies out in consequence.  Similarly with us.  We cannot carry the weight of the awareness born of our hypertrophic brains, an awareness that is not life-enhancing but inimical to life.

Human existence is thus absurd, without point or purpose.  For human existence is not a merely biological living, but a conscious and self-conscious living, a reflective and self-questioning living in the light of the 'knowledge' of good and evil.  Human existence is  a mode of existence in which one apperceives oneself as aware of moral distinctions and as free to choose right or wrong.  Whether or not we are really free, we cannot help but experience ourselves as free.  Having become morally reflective, man becomes self-questioning.  He hesitates, he feels guilty, his direct connection to life is weakened and in some cases destroyed.  He torments himself with questions he cannot answer.  The male beast in heat seizes the female and has his way with her.  He doesn't reflect or scruple.  'Respect for persons' does not hobble him.  The human beast, weakened by consciousness, self-consciousness, moral sensitivity, reason, objectivity, and all the rest, hesitates and moralizes -- and the female gets away.

In short, man is a sick animal weakened by an over-developed brain  who torments himself with questions about morality and ultimate meaning and then answers them by inventing consolatory fictions about God and the soul, or else about a future society in which the problem of meaning will be solved.  Either pie in the sky or pie in the future to be washed down with leftist Kool-Aid.  The truth, however, is that there is no ultimate meaning to be found either beyond the grave or this side of it.  The truth is that human existence -- which again is not a merely biological living -- is absurd.  And at some level we all know this to be the case.  We all know, deep down, that we are just over-clever land mammals without a higher origin or higher destiny.  One who will not accept this truth and who seeks to evade reality via religious and secular faiths is intellectually dishonest.  Anti-natalism follows from intellectual honesty:  it is wrong to cause the existence of more meaningless human lives.  It is unfortunate that the human race came to be in the first place; the next best thing would be for it to die out.

Many of us have entertained such a dark vision at one time or another.  But does it stand up to rational scrutiny?  Could this really be the way things are?  Or is this dark vision the nightmare of a diseased mind and heart?

There are several questions we can ask.  Here I will consider only one: Can Zapffe legitimately demand intellectual honesty given his own premises?

The Demand for Intellectual Honesty

Zapffe thinks that we ought to be intellectually honest and admit the absurdity of human existence.  This is presumably a moral ought, and indeed a categorical moral ought.  We ought to accept the truth, not because of some desirable consequence of accepting it, but because it is the truth.  But surely the following question cannot be suppressed:  What place is there in an amoral universe for objective moral oughts and objective moral demands?  No place at all.

It is we who demand that reality be faced and it is we who judge negatively those we do not face it.  We demand truthfulness and condemn willful self-deception.  But these demands of ours are absurd demands if our mental life is an absurd excrescence of matter.  The demands would in that case have no objective validity whatsoever.  The absurdist cannot, consistently with his absurdism, make moral demands and invoke objective moral oughts.   He cannot coherently say: You ought to face the truth!  You ought not deceive yourself or believe something because it is consoling or otherwise life-enhancing.  Why should I face the truth? 

"Because it is the truth."

But this is no answer, but a miserable tautology.  The truth has no claim on my attention unless it is objectively valuable and, because objectively valuable, capable of generating in me an obligation to accept it.  So why should I accept the truth?

"Because accepting the truth will help you adapt to your environment."

But this is exactly what is not the case in the present instance.  The truth I am supposed to accept, namely, that my existence is meaningless, is inimical to my happiness and well-being.  After all, numerous empirical studies have shown that conservatives, who tend to be religious, are much happier than leftists who tend to be irreligious.  These people, from the absurdist perspective, fool themselves, but from the same perspective there can be no moral objection to such self-deception.

So again, assuming that human life is absurd, why should we accept rather than evade this supposed truth?

The absurdist cannot coherently maintain that one ought to be intellectually honest, or hold that being such is better than being intellectually dishonest.  Nor can he hold that humans ought not procreate.  Indeed, he cannot even maintain that it is an objectively bad thing that human existence is absurd.

The fundamental problem here is that the absurdist cannot coherently maintain that truth is objectively valuable.  In his world there is no room for objective values and disvalues. By presupposing that truth is objectively valuable and that our intellectual integrity depends on acknowledging it, he presupposes something inconsistent with his own premises.

"You are ignoring the possibility that objective values are grounded in objective needs.  We are organisms that need truth because we need contact with reality to flourish.  This is why truth is objectively valuable."

But again this misses the crucial point that on Zapffe's absurdism, acceptance of the truth about our condition is not life-enhancing, not conducive to our flourishing.  On the contrary, evasion of this 'truth' is life-enhancing. 

...............................

Addendum :  Karl White refers us to some translations of Zapffe.

Self-Made Meaning is Unmeaning

One can bake bread, buy bread, or beg bread. Can one bake for oneself the bread of meaning? Or must one ask for it? (One cannot buy it.) Some say that the only meaning a life has is the meaning the liver of the life gives it.  This is a mistake as I will argue in painful detail in a separate entry. For now I merely invoke the authority of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, trs. Foster and Miller, Ignatius Press, 1969, p. 73, orig. publ. in German in 1968:

Meaning that is self-made is in the last analysis no meaning. Meaning, that is, the ground on which our existence as a totality can stand or live, cannot be made but only received.

To which I add: if there is no meaning there to be received, then there is no meaning.

Meaning as Bread

As an addendum to yesterday's Platonizing entry on "Give us this day our daily bread," I draw upon Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, trs. Foster and Miller, Ignatius Press, 1969, p. 73, orig. publ. in German in 1968:

Meaning is the bread on which man, in the intrinsically human part of his being, subsists.

Immortality and Meaning

Here at Maverick Philosopher: Strictly Philosophical. Is the brevity of life an argument against its ultimate meaningfulness? Or is rather that case that brevity is necessary for meaning, and that eternal life would be an eternal drag? I draw upon a neglected and no-longer-read philosopher, A. E. Taylor.

Is St. Paul an Anti-Natalist?

I wrote in Christian Anti-Natalism? (10 November 2017):

Without denying that there are anti-natalist tendencies in Christianity that surface in some of its exponents, the late Kierkegaard for  example, it cannot be maintained that orthodox Christianity, on balance, is anti-natalist.

Ask yourself: what is the central and characteristic Christian idea? It is the Incarnation, the idea that God became man in Jesus of Nazareth. Thus God, or rather the second person of the Trinity, entered into the material world by being born of a woman, entering into it in the most humble manner imaginable, inter faeces et urinam nascimur. 

The mystery of the Nativity of God in a humble manger in a second-rate desert outpost of the Roman empire would seem to put paid to the notion that Christianity is anti-natalist.

To sum it up aphoristically: Nativity is natalist.

I still consider what I wrote above to be basically correct: Christianity is not, or at least is not obviously, anti-natalist. But now I want to consider a much more specific question: Is Paul an anti-natalist? To narrow the question still further: Is Paul advocating an anti-natalist position at 1 Corinthians 7? My correspondent, Karl White, thinks so:

Paul promotes celibacy as the highest ideal, the logical outcome of which is an end to humanity. I simply cannot see how anyone can dispute this. 

I shall now dispute it.

We cannot sensibly discuss the question whether Paul is an anti-natalist without first answering the logically prior question: What is an anti-natalist? David Benatar, the premier contemporary spokesman for the view, summarizes his position when he writes, "all procreation is wrong." (Benatar and Wassermann, Debating Procreation: Is it Wrong to Reproduce? Oxford UP 2015, 12) He means, of course, that it is morally wrong or morally impermissible to reproduce.  The claim, then, is a normative one. It is therefore not a statement about what is factually the case or a prediction as to what is likely to happen.  It is a claim to the effect that we humans ought not reproduce.  (If you are curious about Benatar's reasons for his unpopular view, I refer you to my Benatar category.)

The question, then, is precisely this: Does Paul, at 1 Corinthians 7, maintain that all procreation is wrong and that we ought not reproduce?  I answer in the negative.

Karl White is certainly right that Paul "promotes celibacy as the highest ideal."  The passage begins, "It is good for a man not to marry," i.e., good for a man not to have sexual intercourse with a woman.  The issue here is not marriage as such, since there can be celibate marriages; the issue is sexual intercourse, and not just sexual intercourse between a man and a woman, but also homosexual and bestial intercourse. And let's not leave out sexual intracourse (to coin a word), i.e., masturbation. (There are Catholic priests who, horribile dictu, actually maintain that their vows of celibacy do not rule out sodomy and masturbation.)*

And there is no doubt that Paul wishes all men to be like him, celibate. (verse 7) But he goes on (verse 9) to say that each has his own gift from God, with different gifts for different men. His gift is the power to be celibate. But others are not so gifted as to be able to attain this lofty standard. For those lacking Pauline self-control  it is better to marry than to burn with lust and fall into a cesspool of immorality.

Paul does not say that it is morally impermissible to reproduce or that it is morally obligatory to refrain from sexual intercourse. In fact, he is saying the opposite: it is morally permissible for a man to marry and have sex with a woman.  It is also a prudent thing to do inasmuch as it forces a man who takes his vows seriously to channel his sexual energy in a way which, even if not productive of offspring, keeps him from immoral behavior.

Paul does not affirm anti-natalism as defined above. He can be plausibly read as saying that sexual intercourse for the purpose of procreation (and presumably only for this purpose)  is morally permissible, but that there is a higher calling, celibacy, one which is not demanded of all.  (It can't be demanded of all, because it is not possible for all: 'Ought' implies 'can.' Only some have been granted Pauline self-control.)

Karl White said, "Paul promotes celibacy as the highest ideal, the logical outcome of which is an end to humanity." But it is not a logical consequence of Paul's preaching that either a) procreation will cease -- no chance of that! -- or b) that procreation ought to cease.  For he is not saying that all ought to be celibate. He is saying that celibacy is supererogatory, above and beyond the call of duty or the demands of moral obligation.  It is only for those we are specially called to it.

Paul is not an anti-natalist in the Benatar sense. He is not maintaining that procreation is morally wrong. But I grant to Karl that there is a sort of anti-natalist flavor to Paul's preaching, perhaps along the following lines.

Procreation is not immoral, contra Benatar. But it nevertheless would be better if people did not engage in it.  This is an ideal that is unattainable except in rare cases and so cannot be prescribed as a moral requirement for all of humanity.  But if it is an ideal, then ideally it would be better if procreation cease and the human race come to an end.

_________________________

*Well, we are all given to self-deception. The weight of concupiscence makes it hard to avoid. Raw desire suborns intellect and conscience.  As a young man, before I was married, I rationalized an affair I had with a married woman by telling myself that I was not committing adultery; she was. It is extremely important for the moral life to observe carefully, and in one's own case, how reason in its infirmity can be so easily suborned by the passions.  Is reason then a whore, as Luther said? No, that goes too far. She's more like a wayward wife. Reason is weak, but not utterly infirm or utterly depraved. If she were either of these, the reasoning of this weblog entry could not be correct when, as it seems to me, it is!

ADDENDUM (3/4/19)

Karl White responds:

To clarify, I should have been more precise in my wording.

 

What I meant to say was something along the lines of "If everyone became celibate, then humanity would end within a generation. Presumably if celibacy is the highest ideal, then Paul could not morally protest at this outcome."

 

Also, Paul is not for a total end of humanity. He believes its highest manifestation is in the guise of the 'spiritual bodies' he describes in his one of his letters and to which he desires all humans will come.

 

So I agree that Paul is not an anti-natalist in the Benatarian sense, but that he would have little problem with humanity in its current manifestation coming to an end seems fairly clear to me.

 

BV:  Now we agree!

 

Dave Bagwill writes,

Some thoughts on Paul and celibacy. I think it is probably the case that Paul thinks of celibacy not as the highest ideal at all, but rather as a vocation, a calling. To contend otherwise would be to ignore Paul's saturation in Jewish thought and worldview. That worldview, shaped by the Jewish scriptures, encourages, admonishes, and praises married life from the very beginning, and children are part and parcel of that state. I think that any interpretation of Paul that disregards this fundamental imperative must be suspect; conversely, his statements are most fruitfully understood in the over-arching Creation imperatives.

 

The case can also be made that biblically, man + woman = Man. Certainly, from experience, married life is the only way (excepting a special call to celibacy) that I could be 'complete', to the extent that I am. The 'classroom' of marriage is where I've learned and am learning that "Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained." - C.S. Lewis

 

It is also prudent to consider not just the words that Paul spoke, but , as Miles Coverdale advised: "“It shall greatly help ye to understand the Scriptures if thou mark not only what is spoken or written, but of whom and to whom, with what words, at what time, where, to what intent, with what circumstances, considering what goeth before and what followeth after. ” "At what time, to what intent, with what circumstances" - if I were a competent exegete, I think an investigation into Paul's writing about celibacy would clear up any notion of a 'higher life' to be had as a result of celibacy alone. I in fact tend to distrust any purported 'spiritual' or 'higher-life' proponent that begins with a disparagement of the married estate.

 

ADDENDUM (3/5/19) Karl White responds to Dave Bagwill:

 

. . . I politely disagree with Dave Bagwill's comments. Paul is famous/infamous for his breaking with Jewish thought - in many ways that is the essence of Paul and why he is credited as the 'founder' of Christianity. His placing of celibacy as the highest ideal seems fairly uncontroversial to me. Also, merely because an individual has found personal contentment in marriage does not somehow invalidate Paul's espousal of celibacy - many have found contentment in celibacy and solitude and Jesus seemed to have little time for the family as an institution.

Apologia Pro Vita Mea: A Reply to a Friendly Critic

Vito Caiati responds to yesterday's Could it be like this?

In yesterday's post, you write, “So I say: if you have the aptitude and the stamina, you live best by seeking the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters with your whole heart and mind and soul, with everything else you do subordinate to that quest and in service of it, and you keep up that quest until the hour of death, always a little out of breath, with no comfortable lounging in any dogmatic edifice, whether atheist, theist, or agnostic.”

The "always a little out of breath" bit gives my statement of a personal credo a perhaps excessively romantic and needlessly literary accent.  But the questing life is the highest life for me, and not just for me. That I sincerely believe. I will add, however, that integral to an examined life is a critical examination of whether the highest life is indeed the examined life. So I am aware of the danger of erecting a dogmatic edifice of my own.

While I appreciate the intellectual and spiritual sentiment that underlies this assertion, I am troubled by two things: First, the fact, which you have acknowledged in the past, that only a minute portion of humanity possesses either the “aptitude” or “stamina” to engage in [the search for] “the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters.”  That this is the case is beyond dispute, but why should it be so?  

It is indeed beyond dispute and is further evidence that the human condition is a predicament, and a nasty one, a predicament to which there may be no good solution.

I find the question very troubling. Historical demographers estimate that between 80 and 100 billion human beings have lived and died since the origin of our species.  The figure is staggering, but as staggering is the fact that all have met their ends in complete ignorance of ultimate truth. 

But we don't know that, Vito. It is after all possible that when Thomas Aquinas had the mystical experience that put an end to his writing, he veridically experienced the ultimate truth and enjoyed an earthly foretaste of the Beatific Vision.  And if the angelic doctor's amanuensis, Reginald, never had any such experience but believed what the master taught, and if what he taught was true, then Reginald too was in contact with the ultimate truth, not in propria persona, but "through a glass darkly," that glass being faith. And the same holds for all the millions of Christians, not to mention adherents of other religions, throughout the ages who have believed without verifying glimpses into the Unseen and also without being able to give good reasons for their belief.  It may have been that all these folks were in contact with ultimate truth even if they can't be said to have known such truth in a manner to satisfy exacting modern requirements on knowledge.

Disease, hunger, violence, physical or mental infirmity, and indigence have precluded even the notion of such a search for most.  The lack of a philosophical or religious inclination has precluded it for almost all of the rest. Thus, a gross and general ignorance of final matters has been and remains the lot of mankind.  Something is profoundly wrong here, and the conviction that a few might have the means and inclination to diverge from the norm is, at best disquieting, and at word [worst?], questionable.

So even if an ultimate, saving truth could be discovered by a proper search, circumstances and personal inadequacy have prevented and will prevent the vast majority from ever finding it on their own.  Something is indeed "profoundly wrong here."  But of course this is just one more goad to the seeker's seeking. 

Second, the search, whether it has taken a religious or philosophic form, has endured for thousands of years and produced no definite or even probable answers, so why continue to engage in it? The assumption appears to be that if pursued with the right attitude, sufficient dedication, and intellectual honesty, it will yield something of this “ultimate truth.” But is it not the case that all the evidence weighs against this belief?

The problem is not that no definite answers have been produced, but that there are too many of them, they contradict one another on key points, and that this is good reason to be skeptical of any particular answer.  To add to the trouble, what I just said will be denied by many intelligent and sincere philosophers.  They will insist that their worldview is either true or more likely to be true than any other, and that the plethora of mutually incompatible worldviews is no decent argument to the contrary. But this too is just part of the predicament we are in, a predicament that the spiritually sensitive find intolerable and seek a way out of.

I am not saying that one is not entitled to devote oneself to this search, but I do not understand the conviction that it a worthwhile pursuit. All sorts of scientific questions remain unresolved, some for hundreds of years, but in approaching them, we are encouraged by the signs of small progress that have been made.  We have no such intellectual incentives in the matters of which you speak. Now, I understand that we have not been able to reach any sort of agreement on a host of other matters, from politics to morals, but in such cases, we at least understand the rough givens with which we are dealing. Of “the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters,” we lack such an understanding. This is hardly encouraging.

This is the nub of the matter. I said in effect that the best life for a human being is a life whose dominant purpose is the search for the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters. (By the way, this search does not exclude politics and morality which rest on controversial philosophical assumptions.) And of course I mean a truth that one existentially appropriates (makes one's own) and lives. There are several ways of objecting to my thesis. Some will claim to have the truth already, and see no point is seeking what one possesses.  There are the dogmatic atheists for whom God and the soul are no longer issues. There are the dogmatic theists who have an answer for everything.  There are the dogmatic agnostics who are quite convinced that nothing can be known or even reasonably believed about ultimates (God, the soul, the meaning of human existence) and who think bothering one's head over these questions is simply foolish and might even drive one crazy such that the best way to live is to focus on the easily accessible foreground objects in the Cave and to make friends with finitude, accepting whatever mundane satisfactions come along until death puts an end to it all.

Vito may be flirting with the agnostic camp. He wonders how what we may as well call The Quest could be "a worthwhile pursuit." One of his arguments is that very few are in a position to pursue the Quest. The other is that the Quest, although pursued by the best and the brightest since time immemorial, has arrived at no solid result acceptable to all thinking people.

To the first point, I would say that the value of the Quest does not depend on how many are in a position to pursue it.  To the second point, I would say that no serious quester give up the Quest for the reason Vito cites.  The Quest is his vocation; he is called to it even if he cannot explain who or what is calling him. He finds deep satisfaction in the searching and the momentary glimpses of insight, and his satisfaction is reinforced by his conviction that the paltry objects pursued by the many are relatively worthless. He sees the vanity, the emptiness, of the world that most find most solidly real. Name and fame, property and pelf, are to him bagatelles.  The Quest is his spiritual practice and it is satisfying to the quester even when there is no tangible outcome. He likes to pray, meditate, study, reason, think, write.  This is all underpinned by a faith that there will be a favorable outcome, if not here, then Elsewhere.

Could it be like this?

I find the following scenario exceedingly strange. We die and become nothing and no question gets answered. Could it be like this? It is epistemically possible, possible for all we know. All we know is damned little. But then what would have been the point of the evolution of animals that pose unanswerable questions? No point! Human life would then be like a joke, but a joke without a teller.

We can't know that the above scenario is true, and we can't know that it is false. So in the end you must decide what you will believe and how you will live. There is no theoretical resolution of the problem; the resolution must be personal, pragmatic, and existential. So I say: if you have the aptitude and the stamina, you live best by seeking the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters with your whole heart and mind and soul, with everything else you do subordinate to that quest and in service of it, and you keep up that quest until the hour of death, always a little out of breath, with no comfortable lounging in any dogmatic edifice, whether atheist, theist, or agnostic.

You meet death with faith, hope, and love. Faith that in some way we cannot now understand we will continue to exist as persons; hope that this is the case and that our present predicament will open out onto something marvellous and finally satisfactory; love for everybody and everything that brought us to this point. You don't want death to find you cursing and snarling, doubting and despairing, let alone sunk in evil-doing.

But to meet death in that salutary way, you must live now as if the above is true. So you can't live like Anthony Bourdain who lived for food and the pleasures of the flesh ("The body is not a temple but an amusement park.") He hanged himself last year as if to say: there is no life beyond this brief material life and its paltry pleasures; so when they run out, you ought to as well. Was he quite sure that there is nothing beyond this mortal predicament? Is that not an astonishing form of dogmatism, the equal of the dogmatism of those who claim to have precise information about the afterlife, its rewards and punishments, and who gets which?

Related:

The Body: Temple or Amusement Park?

Man Does Not Live by Bread Alone

Fragment of a Credo

I cannot know whether my life makes ultimate sense.  But I can live as if it does, and if I do I will live better than if I live as if it does not.

I cannot know whether my life is bounded by bodily birth and death. But I can live as if it is not, and if I do I will live better than if I live as if it is.

How Can Anyone Live for This Life Alone?

This just over the transom:

There's a question I've been pondering for some time that I'd like your opinion on if you're willing. I've always been fascinated by people who have been occupied and consumed by the things of the world- power, money, fame, sex, etc. For example, I just finished watching a documentary about Ronnie Coleman, one of, if not the most, famous body builders of all time. For him, body building was his life, he won 8 Mr. Olympia titles. Now, in his old age, he has horrible back issues from all his training and gets around on crutches. Yet he says he regrets nothing. There are countless examples of people who spend their entire lives devoted to the material and transient world, seemingly in complete ignorance of the Divine and the eternal.

As a Christian, I find it hard to understand how this is possible. If God does exist, and there is an eternal realm as Plato thought, then how can someone be 'satisfied' with a life that was devoted to the temporal and earthly realm? Is it that such persons are simply ignorant? Or perhaps such persons are willfully ignorant? As a person who has always had a religious disposition, like yourself, I find it hard to understand and sympathize with people who do not. 

Any thoughts you might have would be much appreciated. Thanks so much for your time. 

How can so many live for the goods of this life alone?

The short answer is that they don't take seriously the idea that there is any other life and any other goods.  It is not just that they don't believe that there is an eternal realm, Unseen Order, divine milieu, or whatever you want to call it.  It is not even an issue for them.  The question is idle and otiose: it simply does not arise for them in any existentially arresting form.  Questions about God and the soul are simply dismissed in the way almost all adults dismiss questions about Santa Claus.

But WHY don't they take Unseen Things seriously? 

It comes down to what could be called one's sense of reality.  For the worldling, the transient things of this world are as real as it gets, and all else is unreal. The impermanence of things and the brevity of life do not impress or shock him as they do someone with a religious sensibility.  The worldling doesn't take then as indices of unreality as a Platonist would. If you point out the brevity of life to a worldling he might give a speech like the following:

Precisely because life is short, one must not waste it.  Brevity does not show lack of reality or value, pace Plato and his latter-day acolytes such as Simone Weil, but how real and valuable life is. This life is as real as it gets.  It is precious precisely because it is short. Make the most of it because there is not much of it, but what there is of it is enough for those who are fortunate, who live well, and who do not die too soon. Don't waste your life on religious illusions!

The attitude here is that life is short but long enough and valuable enough, at least for some of us.  One should make friends with finitude enjoying what one has and not looking beyond to what is merely imagined.  Near the beginning of the The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus quotes Pindar, "O my soul, do not aspire to immortal life, but exhaust the limits of the possible." (Pythian, iii)

A frat boy might put it like this:

Ashes to ashes
Dust to dust
Life is short
So party we must.

Or in the words of a 1970 beer commercial:

You only go around once in life
So you have to grab for all the gusto you can.

This attitude of the worldling is possible because it is actual and indeed widespread more so now than ever before in history, in good measure because of our technology that extends life and makes it vastly  more endurable than in previous centuries. Our 24-7, 365(6) connectivity also practically insures that we will remain trapped within the sphere of immanence and be unable to 'pick up any signals' from beyond the human horizon. 

The worldling's attitude is a matter of sensibility and it is difficult to argue with anyone's sensibility. I cannot argue you out of your sense of reality. Arguments come too late for that.  In fact, arguments are often little more than articulations on the logical plane  of a sensibility deep in the soul that was already in place before one attained explicit logical skills.

Is the worldling ignorant?

My reader and I would say he is. But how prove it either to him or to us? Can one PROVE that God and the soul are real? No. At best one can give a number of plausible arguments for these 'objects' and a number of plausible arguments against metaphysical naturalism. But at the end of the day one is going to have to invoke certain mystical vouchsafings, intimations, glimpses, revelations, teachings of some magisterium deemed finally authoritative, all of which are easily hauled before the bench of reason to have their veridicality questioned. In the end, a leap of faith. You will have to decide what to believe and how to live.

Suppose I take the 'bite of conscience' as pointing to the existence of a Supreme Moral Authority of a personal nature.  I could make a very strong case. But would it be rationally compelling? No.  Could I ever be objectively certain that no naturalistic explanation could account adequately for the deliverances of conscience?  I don't think so.

Is the worldling morally culpable for his ignorance?

Some might be, but in general, he is not.  Pace St. Paul at Romans 1: 18-20, I don't find unbelief to be morally culpable.  It is neither evident that God exists nor evident that he does not exist.

A Worthy Life's Goal

To think as clearly as one can and as deeply as one can about as many ultimate issues as one can for as long as one can.

A Similar Pattern of Argument in Buddhism and Benatar

On Buddhism the human (indeed the animalic/sentient) condition is a profoundly unsatisfactory predicament from which we need extrication.  The First Noble Truth is that fundamentally all is ill, suffering, unsatisfactory, dukkha. That there is some sukha (joy, happiness) along with the dukkha is undeniable, but the little sukha is fleeting and unsatisfying and leads to dukkha  which is primary. Desire breeds desire endlessly with no satisfaction being finally satisfactory. You may satisfy your sexual craving, but the satisfaction is impermanent and gives rise to further desires upon desires and temporary satings upon temporary satings which become increasingly habitual but never finally satisfactory.  So not only is frustration of desire unsatisfactory, satisfaction of it is as well. Either way dukkha is the upshot. This is the deep and radical meaning of the First Noble Truth.

Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of suffering: birth is suffering, aging is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering; union with what is displeasing is suffering; separation from what is pleasing is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering; in brief, the five aggregates subject to clinging are suffering.

The Second Noble Truth is that suffering has its origin in desire or craving (tanha). The natural pursuit and possession of the ordinary objects of desire such as name and fame, pleasure and pelf, property and progeny, power and position  all breed attachment, and this attachment breeds misery. Why? Because the ordinary objects of desire are impermanent (anicca) and insubstantial (anatta).  They lack the power to satisfy us. Desire or craving (tanha)  drives us to cling to the fleeting and unreal that cannot last and cannot ultimately satisfy.  In this sense sukha, which is derivative, leads to dukkha which is primitive and fundamental.

Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of the origin of suffering: it is this craving which leads to re-becoming, accompanied by delight and lust, seeking delight here and there; that is, craving for sensual pleasures, craving for becoming, craving for disbecoming.

Should we then re-direct desire to what is permanent  and possesses self-nature, God for example? You would think so, right?

No!

For on original, radical, Pali Buddhism nothing is permanent and nothing possesses self-nature. All is impermanent and insubstantial. This is the nature of things and cannot be otherwise. The task cannot be to re-direct desire to the Eternal in the manner of a Christian Platonist such as St. Augustine who turns away from this deceitful world of time and change and misery and seeks salvation in God.  The problem is desire itself, not mis-directed desire. The task, then, must be to uproot desire. The task is to step off of the wheel of samsara and achieve cessation or nirvana.

Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of the cessation of suffering: it is the remainderless fading away and  cessation of that same craving, the giving up and relinquishing of it, freedom from it, non-reliance on it.

How do we extirpate desire and end our delusive attachment to the insubstantial and unreal and unsatisfactory? 

Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of the way leading to the cessation of suffering: it is this noble eightfold path; that is, right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration.

Critical Question

How can the entire samsaric realm, including us and the manifold objects of our desire, be devalued  relative to a  nonexistent and indeed impossible standard? If nothing is permanent and nothing can be permanent how can impermanence be a negative axiological feature of what alone exists? And if nothing is and can be a self or substance, how is it any argument against samsaric items that they are devoid of self-nature?

I am assuming that there cannot be impossible ideals. Either an ideal is realized or it is not. If the former, then it is possible. If the latter then it must be realizable.  Ideals must be realizable if they are to be ideals.  What is realizable is possible. So if permanence is an ideal, then it must be possible. But it is not possible on early Buddhist principles. So it is not an ideal. Since it is not an ideal, nothing samsaric falls short of it.  It follows that ordinary objects of desire cannot, all of them, be unsatisfactory on the ground of their impermanence.

To appreciate my point, suppose God as classically conceived exists. Think of the God of Augustine and Aquinas. He is permanent, a self (in excelsis) and absolutely and finally satisfying to himself and to those who share his life. If such a God exists, then it makes perfect sense to consider of lower or even of no value the objects of ordinary mundane desire such as money and property and the paltry pleasures of the flesh.

The great Spanish mystic, St. Teresa of Avila, is supposed to have said to the nuns in her care, "Sisters, we have but one night to spend in this bad inn."

To liken the world to a bad inn makes sense as a claim purporting to be objectively true only if there is a heavenly home to which it is possible to go. But if there is no God, no soul, and this life is all there is, then this world of time and change cannot be objectively assessed to be of little or no value.  Any such assessment could then be subjective only, and if Nietzsche is right, a slandering of life  that merely reflects the physiological decadence of the sick slanderers who are too sick to face reality and must in compensation invent hinterworlds.

As Nietzsche remarks in Twilight of the Idols, in the section entitled "The Problem of Socrates," if there is no true world, then there is no merely apparent world either :  this world objectively lacks plenary reality and value and is rightly assessed as lacking such only if there is a true world  it falls short of.

I spoke to a hermit monk a couple of summers ago. I said, "This world is a vanishing quantity." He agreed wholeheartedly, having abandoned  a millionaire's life as a super-successful Wall Street bond trader  for the austerities of a monkish, and indeed eremitic,  existence with its vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. But my assertion and his agreement could make no sense as an objective negative appraisal of the reality and value of this world except on the assumption that there is an Unseen Order that is not impermanent to its core, but the opposite, the source of all intelligibility, reality, and value, and the summum bonum, the highest good, of human striving.  And if the assumption is true, then the negative appraisal is true.

 

 

 

A Similar Pattern in Benatar

One source of David Benatar's anti-natalism is his conviction that human life, on balance, is objectively bad for all despite how well-placed one is. There is some good, of course, but the bad so preponderates that it is morally wrong to perpetuate this life by procreation. But the standards and ideals Benatar invokes to show the objectively bad quality of human life are impossible as I try to show in this preliminary draft. My thought is that to fall short of an impossible standard is not to fall short. Benatar's radical pessimism and anti-natalism do not comport well with his naturalism.

To this extent my critique of Pali Buddhism and of Benatar is 'Nietzschean.' Impossible standards do not permit a devaluation of what actually exists. 

But I share Nietzsche's naturalism and atheism as little as I share Benatar's. And of course I reject Nietzsche's psycho-physiological reductionism: the deep sense of philosophers and sages from time immemorial that this life is no good cannot be dismissed as a merely subjective response of the sick and decadent.  Thus a No to Nietzsche's reading of Phaedo 118:

Concerning life, the wisest men of all ages have judged alike: it is no good. Always and everywhere one has heard the same sound from their mouths -- a sound full of doubt, full of melancholy, full of weariness of life, full of resistance to life. Even Socrates said, as he died: "To live -- that means to be sick a long time: I owe Asclepius the god of healing a rooster." Even Socrates was tired of it. [. . .] "At least something must be sick here," we retort. 

If the appearance of life's low quality is real, because life falls short of the ideal, then the ideal must itself be real -- elsewhere, not here below, but in the Unseen Order. 

Is the Quality of Life Objectively Evaluable on Naturalism?

This is the penultimate draft of the paper I will be presenting in Prague at the end of this month at the Benatar conference. Comments are welcome from those who are familiar with this subject.

.......................................................

 

IS THE QUALITY OF LIFE OBJECTIVELY EVALUABLE ON NATURALISM?

William F. Vallicella

Abstract

This article examines one of the sources of David Benatar's anti-natalism according to which “all procreation is [morally] wrong.” (DP 12) This source is the claim that each of our lives is objectively bad whether we think so or not. The question I will pose is whether the constraints of metaphysical naturalism allow for an objective devaluation of human life sufficiently negative to justify anti-natalism My thesis is that metaphysical naturalism does not have the resources to support such a negative evaluation. Metaphysical naturalism is the view that causal reality is exhausted by nature, the space-time system and its contents.

The gist of my argument is that the ideal standards relative to which our lives are supposed to be axiologically substandard cannot be merely subjectively excogitated but must be objectively possible; they cannot be on metaphysical naturalism; ergo, failure to meet these ideal standards cannot show that our lives are objectively bad.

…................................................

David Benatar maintains that "while some lives are better than others, none are (noncomparatively or objectively) good." (HP 67) The claim is that each of our lives is objectively bad whether we think so or not, and no matter how good an individual's life is compared to that of others. This is a very strong thesis since it says more than that some human lives are objectively better than others. It says in addition that no human life is objectively good. This is one of the sources of Benatar's anti-natalism, according to which “all procreation is wrong.” (DP 12) What sorts of considerations could persuade us that no human life is objectively good?

The Allegedly Poor Quality of Human Life

In The Human Predicament Benatar begins with the minor discomforts suffered by the healthy on a daily basis: thirst, hunger, distended bladders and bowels, heat and cold, weariness, and the like. Now most of us consider these sorts of things inconsequential even if we add to them the usual run of aches and pains and annoyances. But for Benatar they are “not inconsequential” because:

A blessed species that never experienced these discomforts would rightly note that if we take discomfort to be bad, then we should take the daily discomforts that humans experience more seriously than we do. (HP 72)

This is a signature Benatar move: adopt some nonexistent, and indeed impossible point of view, and then, from that point of view, issue a negative value judgment about what actually exists or some feature of what actually exists. It is this sort of move that I want to examine. It strikes me as dubious because there is no species of animal relevantly similar to us that never experiences anything like the discomforts mentioned above, and it seems to me that such a species of critter is nomologically impossible. If so, why should the fact that I can imagine a form of animal life free of everyday discomforts have any tendency to show that we should take more seriously, i.e., assess more negatively, the everyday discomforts of our actual animal lives?

This opening consideration brings me to the central question of this paper: Do the constraints of metaphysical naturalism allow for an objective devaluation of human life sufficiently negative to justify anti-natalism? My thesis is that metaphysical naturalism does not have the resources to support such a negative evaluation. But first we need to review further features of our predicament that cast doubt on its quality.

Besides the minor discomforts of the healthy, a second class of negative states includes those experienced regularly though not daily or by all. These include itches, allergies, colds, fevers, infections, menstrual cramps, hot flashes, and so on. And then, beyond physical sensations there are the various frustrations and irritations of life: waiting in lines, having to put up with the bad behavior of others, traffic jams, boring work, loneliness, unrequited love, betrayals, jealousies, the list goes on. But even these things are not that bad. If we stop here we don't have much of an argument for the claim that the quality of all our lives, even the lives of the luckiest, is objectively bad. If the only bads were the ones so far mentioned, then most of us well-placed individualswould say that they are outweighed by the goods.

When we get to the really horrific events and setbacks, however, Benatar's case gains in credibility. Cancer and the miseries attendant upon its treatment, clinical depression, rape and murder and the tortures of the gulag, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and so much else bespeak the poor quality of human life. And don't think only of the present; consider also the horrors of the long past of humanity. Anyone who without blinkers surveys these miseries must admit that the quality of human life for many or most is very bad indeed. People who gush over how wonderful life is, what a gift it is, etc. should be made to visit insane asylums, prisons, torture chambers, and battlefields. And even if my life is good, how good can it be given that I am aware of the horrific fates of others and that it is possible that I end up where they are? But surely many are fortunate and escape the evils just enumerated and their like. So we still don't have a good argument from the quality of life for the extreme thesis that every human life is such that the objectively bad outweighs the objectively good, and that therefore all procreation is morally wrong.

Is There More Bad Than Good for All?

Benatar nevertheless insists that "There is much more bad than good even for the luckiest humans." (HP 77) So no matter how well-situated you are, your life is objectively more bad than good, and if you think otherwise then your assessment of the quality of your life is biased and inaccurate. The first consideration Benatar adduces is the empirical fact that "the most intense pleasures are short-lived, whereas the worst pains can be much more enduring." (77) There is chronic pain but no chronic pleasure. Then there is the fact that the worst pains are worse than the best pleasures are good. (77). No one would trade an hour of the worst torture for an hour of the best pleasure. A third fact is that in a split second one can be severely injured, "but the resultant suffering can last a lifetime." (78) And then there is the long physical decline of the mortal coil, the frustration of desires and aspirations, and the constant striving and struggling that life involves to keep the whole thing going. We are effortlessly ignorant, "but knowledge usually requires hard work." (80) We value knowledge and longevity, but can realize these values only to a tiny extent. We are far closer to nescience than to omniscience.

Why Do We Fail to Notice the Preponderance of the Bad?

In short, the bad preponderates and for all. Why do we fail to notice the heavy preponderance of the bad in human life? Because we have accommodated to the human condition. (82) "Longevity, for example, is judged relative to the longest actual human lifespans and not relative to an ideal standard." (82) The point is that the brevity of human life, when measured against “an ideal standard” is an objective reason for a negative evaluation of the quality of our lives. And similarly with respect to knowledge, understanding, and moral goodness. We measure ourselves against the human baseline and not against an ideal standard. This is why we fail to notice that the bad outweighs the good. If the standard of knowledge is the human baseline, then this philosopher feels good about himself; but if the standard is omniscience, then he must sadly confess that he knows next to nothing. And while he fancies himself a better man than most, he owns to being an utter wretch, morally speaking, in comparison to Moral Perfection itself. In religious terms, we are all sinners in the eyes of God, and the moral differences between us shrink into insignificance relative to the divine standard of holiness. But of course no appeal to God as an existing ideal standard is possible within Benatar's naturalism.

Towards a Critique

At this juncture we need to ask again: How can anything be objectively devalued relative to an ideal standard that is not only nonexistent but also impossible of realization? Such a standard is an axiological analog of an unperformable action. If I cannot do action A, then I cannot be morally obliged to do A and morally censured if I fail to do A. An agent cannot fairly be judged morally defective for failing to perform actions that it is impossible for him to perform. Analogously, if a thing fails to meet a standard that it is impossible for it to meet, then its failure to meet it is no ground for its objective devaluation. Merely subjective complaints about the brevity of life are understandable enough, but given the nomological impossibility of achieving extremely long life spans it is no argument against the value of our short lives that they are short. Let me see if I can make this clear.

The Generalized Ought-Implies-Can Principle: What Ought to Be Must be Possible

Pain is far worse than pleasure is good. That this is so strikes us as a very bad natural arrangement. It would be better if this were not the case. One way to express this is by saying that animals ought to feel only as much pain as is necessary to warn them of bodily damage. Or humans ought to be wired up in such away that “aversive behavior [is] mediated by a rational faculty rather than a capacity to feel pain.” (DP 56) These are examples of an ought-to-be as opposed to an ought-to-do.1 For they make no reference to any (finite) agent who is morally obliged to bring about the state of affairs and has the ability to do so. But what ought to be must be possible. Or so I maintain. The principle may be expressed as follows:

GOC: Necessarily, if state of affairs S ought to be, then S is really possible and not merely imaginable or conceivable.

The principle covers both the ought-to-do and the non-agential ought-to-be. (The non-agential ought-to-be is a state of affairs that ought to be, but is not in the power of any finite agent to bring about.) If I ought to do A, then it must be really possible for A to be done in general and for me in particular to do it. And if there ought to be less animal pain in the world than there is, then it must be really possible that there be less animal pain than there is. By contraposition, if it is nomologically impossible that there be less animal pain than there is, then it is not the case that there ought to be less animal pain than there is. If so, then it cannot be objectively bad that there is as much as there is. If what I desire is impossible, then it cannot be objectively bad that what I desire is not the case.

By 'conceivable,' I mean thinkable without narrowly-logical contradiction. By 'really possible,' I mean possible in reality and not merely conceivable by a finite mind, or imaginable by a finite mind, or epistemically possible (possible for all we know/believe), or not ruled out by the law of non-contradiction (LNC). That which is possible for all we know might be impossible in reality. And that which is not ruled out by LNC merely satisfies a necessary condition for being really possible. But satisfaction of LNC is not itself a type of real possibility. If a state of affairs is merely logically possible, then it is not (really) possible at all: 'logical' in 'logical possibility' is an alienans adjective. One must not assume that for each different sense of 'possible' there is a corresponding mode of real possiblity. That would be to conflate semantics with ontology. One principle governing real possibility is as follows:

CNP: Conceivability or imaginability by finite minds does not entail real possibility.

So if we ought to live longer than we do then it must be possible that we do. If we ought to be more knowledgeable than we are then it must be possible for us to be. If we ought to be morally better than we are, or even morally perfect, these states of affairs must be possible. If we ought to have the capacity “to breathe not only in air but also in water,” (DP 57) then this too must be really possible.

Like Benatar I find it horrifying that some animals are eaten alive by other animals. Those of us who are sensitive are regularly struck by the horror and heartlessness of predation and the vast extent of unpalliated animal pain. Some of us who are theists feel our theism totter when we wonder how a loving and omniscient and all-powerful God could create such a charnel house of a world red in tooth and claw. We feel that such a world ought not be! It ought to be that all animals are herbivores, or zombies as philosophers use this term, or machines, which is what Descartes thought they were. But these oughts-to-be are normatively vacuous unless they are nomologically possible, unless the (contingent) laws of nature permit them. In the case of the usual run of aches, pains, maladies and miseries to which our mortal flesh is heir I should think that they are nomologically necessary if we are to have animal bodies at all. If this right, then it is no good argument in devaluation of the quality of our lives that we suffer in the ways Benatar reports.

Why Accept the Generalized Ought-Implies-Can Principle?

I grant that the principle is not self-evident, but I consider it evident. For suppose you deny it. Let S be a 'mere ought,' a state of affairs that is not, but ought to be. Then you are maintaining both that S ought to be, and that it is not the case that S is really possible. You are saying that S ought to be but cannot be. This is incoherent since it severs the link between oughtness and being (existence). What OUGHT to be, ought TO BE.

OB. Necessarily, every ought is an ought TO BE.

But if the ought in question is a 'mere ought,' one that as a matter of contingent fact is not, then the only possible link between oughtness and existence is forged by real possibility. Therefore, GOC. Nothing ought to be unless it can be.

The situation is analogous to that of the possible and the actual. The merely possible by definition is that which is possible but not actual. Although not actual, the merely possible cannot be out of all relation to the actual. The possible is by its very nature as possible, possibly actual: it is actualizable. If you tell me that talking donkeys are possible but not actualizable, then you are telling me that talking donkeys are both possible and impossible. Thus:

PPA. Necessarily, if a state of affairs S is really possible, then S is possibly actual or actualizable.

But nothing is actualizable unless there is an agent that can actualize it.

AA. Necessarily, if a state if affairs is actualizable, then there is an actual agent with the power to actualize it.

The really possible is grounded in the causal powers of actual agents. For if a state of affairs is really possible, but there is no actual agent having the power to actualize it, then it is not possibly actual, in violation of (PPA).

Would it be Better if We were Amphibious?

As far as I know, Benatar does not speak of the ought-to-be. Instead he says things like the following: “it would certainly be better for humans if they could not drown – that is, if they had the capacity to breathe not only in air but also in water.” (DP 57) Of course, he means objectively better, not just subjectively desirable. So clarity bids us supply a connecting principle: what is better than what is, ought to be.

BOB. If state of affairs S is objectively better than actual state of affairs T, then S ought to be instead of T.

Now I can run my argument. If it were better for us to be amphibious, then it ought to be that we be amphibious. (BOB). If it ought to be that we be amphibious, then it is really possibly that we be. (GOC) But it is not nomologically possible, and therefore not really possible. Therefore it is not the case that it ought to be that we be amphibious. And if it is not the case that we ought to be amphibious, then it is not objectively bad that we are not amphibious.

Metaphysical Possibility

But I hear an objection coming.

Granted, it is not nomologically possible that we breathe both air and water, but it is metaphysically possible. Why should nomological possibility exhaust real possibility? Metaphysical possibility satisfies the Generalized Ought-Implies-Can principle.

The answer is that what is really possible or not is grounded in the actual causal powers and causal liabilities of actual agents, and on metaphysical naturalism, the only agents are those found in the space-time world. No natural agent has the power to actualize a possible world in which humans breathe both air and water. God has the power but God cannot be invoked by the naturalist.

On metaphysical naturalism, the normative, if it is to be objective, can only be grounded in natural facts independent of our subjective attitudes. For on metaphysical naturalism, there can be no existing ideal standards for a species of living thing except actual perfect specimens. But any actual perfect specimen, whether leonine, human, whatever, will fall short of Benatar's demands. Even the best human specimen will be limited in longevity, knowledge, moral goodness, and the rest.

My point is that Benatar's ideal standards, without which he cannot evaluate as bad even the most fortunate of human lives, are merely excogitated or thought up by him and others: they can have no basis in physical or metaphysical reality given his naturalism. To fall short of a standard that is nowhere realized and has never been realized is not to fall short. But the point is stronger when put modally: to fall short of a standard impossible of realization is not to fall short. A lion without claws is a defective lion; he falls short of the standard, a standard that actually exists in non-defective lions. But a lion that cannot learn to speak Italian is not a defective lion since it is nomologically impossible that lions learn human languages.

One can imagine a cat that talks, and wouldn't the world be better if we could converse with our pets? But neither imaginability nor conceivablity entail real possibility, and if a state of affairs is not really possible, then no actual state of affairs can be devalued relative to it. It is not bad that cats can't talk. And it is not bad, given that human beings are just a highly-evolved species of land mammal, that they can't know everything or live to be a thousand years old. Thus it is no argument against the quality of human life that it falls short of a standard that is nowhere realized but is merely dreamed up as an empty logical or metaphysical (broadly logical) possibility.

What Benatar is doing is a bit like complaining that turkeys don't fly around ready-roasted. That is no argument in denigration of the value of turkeys because it is nomologically impossible that turkeys fly around ready-roasted. Similarly, on naturalism, it is no argument against the value of human life that human longevity maxes out at about 122 years or that our science is closer to nescience than to omniscience.

The Problem Summarized as an Aporetic Tetrad

As I see it, the underlying problem is that not all of the following propositions can be true even though each has a strong claim on our acceptance:

1. The quality of life is objectively bad for all and ought to be other than it is.
2. GOC: What ought to be is really possible.
3. If naturalism is true, then it is not really possible that human life be other than it is (in the respects that Benatar mentions including longevity, moral perfection, etc.).
4. Naturalism is true: Causal reality is exhausted by space-time and its contents.

A fairly strong case can be made for each of the limbs of our tetrad. But they can't all be true.

Three Solutions

I can think of three possible solutions to the tetrad. I'll call them Platonic-Theistic, Anti-Platonic or Nietzschean, and Hybrid. (Needless to say I am not engaged in Plato or Nietzsche exegesis.)

The Platonic-Theistic Response

On Platonism broadly construed as I am construing it the ideal standards relative to which our lives are substandard actually exist and are therefore possible. They don't exist here below in this merely apparent world of time and change, but up yonder in a true world of timeless reality. Moral perfection, for example, exists as a Platonic Form, or in Christian Platonism as God. (Thomists, by the way, are Platonists in heaven even if they are Aristotelians on Earth.) Since Moral Perfection exists, it is possible of realization; indeed it realizes itself as the paradigm case of moral perfection thereby serving as a standard for other moral agents. This allows us to say, coherently, that it is objectively the case that we humans fall short of moral perfection, and that it is objectively bad that we do so.

Clearly, we ought to be much better than we are and perhaps even perfect. “Be ye perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect.” (MT 5:48) But this normative statement cannot be objectively true unless Moral Perfection exists, up yonder in a topos ouranos, if not here below. On this scheme one solves the tetrad by denying (4). One rejects naturalism while retaining the other propositions. One argues from the first three limbs taken together to the negation of the fourth. On this approach one agrees with Benatar that the quality of natural life is objectively bad and ought to be other than it is. If so, then naturalism is false.

The Anti-Platonic or Nietzschean Response

Benatar maintains that human life is objectively bad for all regardless of what a particular human feels or thinks. A Nietzschean could solve the problem by rejecting (1), by denying that life is objectively bad . (Obviously, if it is not objectively bad, then it is not objectively bad for all.) It cannot be objectively bad because the quality or value of life cannot be objectively evaluated at all, either positively or negatively. As Nietzsche writes in The Twilight of the Idols, “The Problem of Socrates,”(W. Kaufmann, The Portable Nietzsche, Viking 1968, p. 474):

Judgments, judgments of value, concerning life, for it or against it, can, in the end, never be true: they have value only as symptoms, they are worthy of consideration only as symptoms; in themselves such judgments are stupidities. . . .the value of life cannot be estimated. (Der Wert des Lebens nicht abgeschaetzt werden kann.) Not by the living, for they are an interested party, even a bone of contention, and not judges; not by the dead, for a different reason. For a philosopher to see a problem in the value of life is thus an objection to him, a question mark concerning his wisdom, an un-wisdom. Indeed? All these great wise men -- they were not only decadents but not wise at all?

As I read Nietzsche, he is telling us that life is in every case an individual's life. There is no human life in general and no fact of the matter as to whether or not human life is objectively more bad than good. Judgments of the quality of life are all essentialy subjective, reflecting as they do nothing more than the quality of the particular life that is doing the judging. The negative evaluations of the weak and decadent are merely symptoms of their weakness and decadence. And similarly for the positive evaluations of the strong and healthy. The affirmations of the robust are not objectively true; they are merely expressions of their robustness. Life is the essentially subjective standard of all evaluation; as such it cannot be objectively evaluated. There is nothing outside of it against which to measure it and find it wanting. As a philosophizing gastroenterologist might say, “The quality of life depends on the liver.” Pessimism and anti-natalism are merely symption of physiological-cum-cultural decadence on the part of those who advance such doctrines.

The Hybrid or Mixed Response

On the third response to the problem one attempts to retain the ideal standards while rejecting their Platonic-theistic non-naturalistic foundation. This is what I see Benatar as doing. He rejects (2) and/or (3) while accepting (1) and (4). Life is objectively more bad than good and concrete reality is exhausted by the space-time system and its contents. And yet the ideal standards that we fail to satisfy and that render our lives objectively bad do so regardless of their being nonexistent and impossible.

Evaluating the Three Responses

The hybrid response of Benatar strikes me as incoherent. For either there is a fact of the matter concerning the value/quality of life or there isn't. If there is, then the standards of evaluation cannot be merely subjectively posited by us or mere expressions of what we like or dislike. There seem to be two possibilities. One is that the ideal standards objectively exist in nature. I am thinking of an approach like that of Philippa Foot. But this approach is of no use to Benatar. So the ideal standards must exist beyond nature. But Benatar cannot countenance this either. On the other hand, if there is no fact of the matter as to the quality/value of life, then Benatar's case is just a tissue of subjective complaints, to which the appropriate response would be : Man (or woman) up! Or Nietzsche's “Become hard!” (Zarathustra).

I would say that if there is a genuine solution, if the tetrad is not an aporia in the strict sense, we must choose between the Platonic and the Nietzschean solutions, and given the untenability of Nietzsche's doctrines, I choose the former. This allows me to agree with Benatar that it is objectively the case that the bad preponderates, and for all, and that it does so despite our optimistic illusions and denials. Human life, viewed immanently, is wretched for all and no amount of Pascalian divertissement can ultimately hide this fact from us. But precisely because this is objectively the case, naturalism is false: concrete reality is not exhausted by nature. There has to be an Unseen Order relative to which this world and we in it are objectively defective. Our lives are defective because this world is a fallen world, one in need of redemption.

How does this bear upon the question of anti-natalism? If Benatar is right and the quality of life is objectively bad for all, then anti-natalism follows. But if I am right, Benatar's view is inconsistent and does not support anti-natalism.

Conclusion

I agree with Benatar that the human condition is a predicament. We are in a state that is drastically unsatisfactory and from which there is no easy exit, and certainly no exit by individual or collective human effort. Pace Leon Trotsky, there is no 'progressive' solution to the human predicament. We are objectively wretched, all of us, and there is nothing we can do about it. Pace Nietzsche, this wretchedness is not a symptom of remediable weakness or decadence. It is an objective condition all of us are in. But precisely because it is objective, metaphysical naturalism is false. That is what I have argued.

My central thesis, then, is that Benatar's position is logically inconsistent. One cannot maintain both that life is objectively bad for all and that naturalism is true. If nothing else, I have shown that Benatar's position is not rationally compelling and that therefore it can be rationally rejected.

I myself favor the Platonic-Theistic approach sketched above. But intellectual honesty forces me to admit that it too has its problems. So my fall-back position is that the terad above is simply insoluble by us, a genuine aporia.

 

Woody Allen, Meet Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange: Meaning and Desire

To repeat some of what I wrote earlier,

According to Woody Allen, we all know that human existence is meaningless and that it ends, utterly and meaninglessly, with death. We all know this, he thinks, but we hide the horrible reality from ourselves with all sorts of evasions and distractions.  Worldly people, for example, imagine that they will live forever and lose themselves in the pursuit of pleasure, money, name and fame. Religious people console themselves with fairy tales about God and the soul and post-mortem bliss.  Leftists, in the grip of utopian fantasies, having smoked the opium of the intellectuals, sacrifice their lives on the altar of activism. And not only their lives: Communists in the 20th century broke 100 millon 'eggs' in pursuit of an elusive 'omelet.' Ordinary folk live for their children and grandchildren as if procreation has redemptive power.

Pushing the line of thought further, I note that Allen is deeply bothered, indeed obsessed in his neurotic  Manhattanite Jewish intellectual sort of way, by the apparent meaninglessness of human existence.  Why does the apparent lack of an ultimate meaning bother him?  It bothers him because a deep desire for ultimate sense, for point and purpose, is going unsatisfied.  He wants  redemptive Meaning, but Meaning is absent.  (Note that what is phenomenologically absent may or may not be nonexistent.)

But a deep and natural desire for a meaning that is absent may be   evidence of a sort for the possibility of the desire's satisfaction.  Why do sensitive souls feel the lack of point and purpose?  The felt lack and unsatisfied desire is at least a fact and wants an explanation.  What explains the felt lack, the phenomenological absence of a redemptive Meaning that could make all this misery and ignorance and evil bearable?  What explains the fact that Allen is bothered by the apparent meaninglessness of human existence?

You could say that nothing explains it; it is just a brute fact that some of us crave meaning. Less drastically, and more plausibly, one could say that the craving for meaning has an explanation in terms of efficient causes, but not one that requires the reality of its intentional object.  Let me explain.

Craving is an intentional state: it is an object-directed state of mind.  One cannot just crave, desire, want, long for, etc.  One craves, desires, wants, longs for something.  This something is the intentional object.  Every intentional state takes an object; but it doesn't follow that every such state takes an object that exists.  If a woman wants a man, it does not follow that there exists a man such that she wants him.  She wants Mr. Right, but no one among us satisfies the requisite criteria.   So while she wants a man, there is no man she wants.  Therefore, the deep desire for Meaning does not guarantee the existence of Meaning. We cannot validily argue, via the intentionality of desiderative consciousness, to the extramental reality of the the object desired.

Nevertheless, if is it a natural (as opposed to an artificially induced) desire we are talking about, then  perhaps there is a way to infer the existence of the object desired from the fact of the desiring, that is, from the existence of the desiderative state, not from the content or realitas objectiva of the desiderative state.  The inferential move from realitas objectiva to realitas formalis is invalid; but the move from the existence of the state to the reality of its object may be valid.

Suppose I want (to drink) water.  The natural desire for water is rooted in a natural need.  I don't just desire it, the way I might desire (to smoke) a cigar; I need it.  Now it doesn't follow from the existence of my need that there is water hereabouts or water in sufficient quantity to keep me alive, but the need for water is very good evidence for the existence of water somewhere. (Suppose all the water in the universe ceases to exist, but I exist for a little longer.  My need for water would still be good evidence for the existence of water at some time.) If there never had been any water, then no critter could desire or need it; indeed no critter could exist at all.

The need for water 'proves' the existence of water.  Perhaps the desire/need for Meaning 'proves' the existence of Meaning.  The felt lack of meaning -- its phenomenological absence -- is grounded in the natural (not artificial) need for Meaning, and this need would not exist if it were not for the extramental reality of a source of Meaning with which we  were once in contact, or the traces of which are buried deep within us.  And this all men call God. 

Mr. Allen, meet Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange:

Since natural desire can never be in vain, and since all men naturally desire beatitude, there must exist an objective being that is infinitely perfect, a being that man can possess, love, and enjoy. (Beatitude, tr. Cummins, Ex Fontibus 2012, p. 79)

This argument, studied in the context of Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics, is more impressive than it may seem.  If  nothing else it ought to undermine the belief of Allen and his like that it is known by all of us today that human existence is ultimately meaningless.

Here is a video with relevant excerpts from G-L's Life Everlasting and the Immensity of the Soul.

A Defense of David Benatar Against a Scurrilous New Criterion Attack

By a defense of Benatar, I do not mean a defense of his deeply pessimistic and anti-natalist views, views to which I do not subscribe. I mean a defense of the courageous practice of unrestrained philosophical inquiry, inquiry that follows the arguments where they lead, even if they issue in conclusions that make people extremely uncomfortable and are sure to bring obloquy upon the philosopher who proposes them.

The hit piece is entitled The 'Wisdom' of Silenus. It bears no author's name and looks to be something like an editorial. The view of Silenus is easily summarized:

Best of all for humans is never to have been born; second best is to die soon.

We should first note that while Benatar subscribes to the first independent clause, he does not embrace the second. One might think that if life is bad, then death must be at least instrumentally good insofar as it puts an end to suffering.  Benatar's view, however, is that "death is no deliverance from the human predicament, but a further feature of it." (The Human Predicament, Oxford UP, 2017, 96)

Benatar outdoes Silenus in pessimism. We are caught in an existential vise, squeezed between life which is bad and death which is also bad. Everyone alive will die. While alive we are in a bad way. When dead we are also in a bad way, Epicurus notwithstanding. There is no escape for those who have had the misfortune of being born. So being born is a misfortune twice over: because life is bad and because being dead is bad.

My first point, then, is that the NC author wrongly assimilates Benatar to Silenus. But why should that bother someone who thinks it acceptable to criticize a book he has not read? I have no problem with someone who dismisses a book unread. My problem is with someone who publishes an article attacking a book he hasn't read.

. . . apart from professional pessimists like Nietzsche’s mentor Arthur Schopenhauer, most people are rightly repelled by this so-called wisdom of Silenus. They understand that life is an inestimable gift, the denial of which is part folly, part obscenity. We said “most people.” There are exceptions. Suicide bombers, disturbed teenagers, and of course certain grandstanding academics. Take Professor David Benatar, head of the department of philosophy at the University of Cape Town. In 2006, Oxford University Press . . . published Professor Benatar’s Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence. [. . .] “The central idea of this book,” we read on the first page of its introduction, “is that coming into existence is always a serious harm.” 

Understandably repelled, but "rightly repelled"?  How does the author know that? How does he know that "life is an inestimable gift"?  If life is a gift,then it has to have a donor, and who might that be, God?  I'm a theist myself, but surely the existence of God is not self-evident to one whose critical faculties are in good working order. If life is a gift of an all-good God, why is life so horrible for so many in so many ways? Of course there is goodness and beauty in the world as well. 

I should think that an intellectually honest person would admit that it is just not clear whether life is an "inestimable gift" or "a business that doesn't cover its costs." (Schopenhauer)  Such a person would admit that it is an open question and if he were inquisitive he would want to examine the arguments on either side. But not our NC author who is content to psychologize and ridicule and dogmatize in a manner depressingly ideological but most unphilosophical.

One of the comments on this book at Amazon.com complains that people have been rejecting the book without reading it or arguing against Professor Benatar’s position. Doubtless there is plenty to argue with, not to say ridicule, in Better Never to Have Been. One might start by meditating on what words like “harm” and “better” might mean in the world according to Benatar. It is sobering to contemplate what logical and existential armageddon had to have occurred in order for something like this book to have been written. Still, we believe people are right to take that high road and reject the book without engaging its argument. To quote Nietzsche again, you do not refute a disease: you might cure it, quarantine it, or in some cases ignore it altogether. You don’t argue with it. Reason is profitably employed only among the reasonable. (Emphasis added.)

The irony here is that the NC author is using Nietzsche of all people to clobber Benatar.  Assuming one thinks it acceptable to engage in quarantine and prohibition, is there any Western philosopher more deserving of quarantine and inclusion on the index librorum prohibitorum? Has our author ever read Nietzsche's The Anti-Christ? If you do not refute a disease, you also do not invoke the product of a diseased mind to dismiss as diseased the work of some other thinker.

As for rationality, Benatar is a paragon of rationality compared to Nietzsche who rants and raves and forwards incoherent views. For example, his perspectivism about truth collapses into an elimination of truth.  

Dr. Johnson had the right idea when he employed the pedal expedient against Bishop Berkeley’s doctrine of universal hallucination. Something similar should be employed in the case of Professor Benatar’s Lemmings First doctrine of human fatuousness.

This is the worst kind of pseudo-philosophical journalistic cleverness and name-dropping. It shows a thorough lack of understanding of Berkeley's idealism. Berkeley was not an eliminativist about material objects.  He did not maintain that rocks and trees do not exist; he did not question WHETHER they are; he offered an unusual ontological account of WHAT they are, namely ideas in the divine mind.  If you know your Berkeley you know that what I just wrote is true and that the good bishop cannot be refuted by kicking a stone.

The gross facts, the Moorean facts, are not in dispute and philosophers are not in the business of denying them. I would have no trouble showing that even with respect to the characteristic theses of Zeno of Elea, F. H. Bradley, and J. E. M. McTaggart.

I do not deny that there are claims that are beneath refutation.  It is not always wrong to dismiss a statement as false or even absurd without proof.  Some claims are refutable by "the pedal expedient." Suppose you maintain that there are no pains, that no one ever feels pain.  Without saying anything, I kick you in the shins with steel-tipped boots, or perhaps I kick you higher up.  I will have brought home to you the plain falsehood of your claim.  Or suppose sophomore Sam  says that there is no truth.  I would be fully within my epistemic rights to respond, 'Is that so?' and then walk away.

But Berkeley is not denying the self-evident. Neither is Benatar. It is not self-evident that human life is an "inestimable gift."  That's not a datum but a theory. Maybe it's true. But maybe it isn't. Inquiry is therefore not only appropriate but necessary for those who seek rational justification for what they believe.

When James Burnham published The Suicide of the West in 1964, what he chiefly feared was the West’s lack of resolve to stand up to encroaching Communism. Quite right, too. Burnham was well endowed with what Henry James called the “imagination of disaster.” But we think that even Burnham might have been nonplussed by a Western intellectual who went beyond political capitulation to total existential surrender and whose proclamation of that gospel found a home at one of our greatest university presses. Even as we were absorbing Professor Benatar’s repackaging of Silenus, we stumbled upon an article revealing that sun-drenched, life-loving Italy had become “the least happy” country in Europe. “It’s a country,” said Walter Veltroni, the mayor of Rome, “that has lost a little of its will for the future.” It’s also a country that has eagerly adopted the philosophy of Professor Benatar and Ms. Vernelli: Italy’s birth rate is an astonishing 1.23, among the lowest in Europe. This is “anti-natalism” with a vengeance.

This is disgusting tabloid stuff. First of all, Benatar is not repackaging Silenus. He is saying something different from Silenus, as we have already seen, and his books are chock-full of challenging arguments and distinctions. There is a lot to be learned from his discussions. I don't find his arguments compelling, but then no arguments in philosophy for substantive theses are compelling. 

Second, our journalist subordinates the search for truth to ideology.  I don't doubt that the West is under demographic threat.  Anti-natalist doctrines, if taken seriously by enough people, will tend to weaken us overagainst the Muslims and others that aim to displace us. But the philosopher seeks the truth, whatever it is, whether it promotes our flourishing or not.

Finally, if one is going to urge the ignoring of  Benatar because of the possible consequences of his views, then one should do the same with others including Herr Nietzsche. His views were input to the destructive ideology of National Socialism. (See Nietzsche and National Socialism) And then there is Karl Marx . . . . 

See also: Mindless Hostility to David Benatar

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David Benatar on the Quality of Human Life, Part II

This is the fifth in a series on David Benatar's The Human Predicament (Oxford UP, 2017). This entry covers pp. 71-83 of Chapter  Four, pp. 64-91, entitled "Quality."

In our last installment we discussed whether Benatar is justified in his claim that the quality of life is in most cases objectively worse than we think it is. (I cast doubt on whether there is an objective fact of the matter.) But even if the quality of our lives is worse than we think it is, it does not follow that the quality of our lives is objectively bad. You will recall that Benatar holds that "while some lives are better than others, none are (noncomparatively or objectively) good." (67)  In other words, each of our lives is objectively bad whether we think so or not.  To arrive at this conclusion further argument is required. To its evaluation we now turn.

The Allegedly Poor Quality of Human Life

Benatar begins with the minor discomforts suffered by the healthy on a daily basis: thirst, hunger, distended bladders and bowels, heat and cold, weariness, and the like.   Now most of us consider these sorts of things inconsequential even if we add to them humidity, mosquitoes, and the usual run of aches and pains and annoyances such as irritating noises and smells, etc.  But for Benatar they are "not inconsequential" because:

A blessed species that never experienced these discomforts would rightly note that if we take discomfort to be bad, then we should take the daily discomforts that humans experience more seriously than we do. (72)

This is a signature Benatar move: adopt some nonexistent, and indeed impossible point of view, and then, from that point of view, issue a negative value judgment about what actually exists or some feature of what actually exists.  There is no species of animal that never experiences anything like the discomforts mentioned above, and it seems to me that such a species of critter is nomologically impossible. Or to put the point a bit more cautiously, there is no species of animal relevantly similar to us that never experiences anything like, etc.

So why should the fact that I can imagine a form of animal life free of everyday discomforts have any tendency to show that we should take more seriously, i.e., assess more negatively, the everyday discomforts of our actual animal lives?

How can anything be devalued relative to a nonexistent standard of value? I will come back to this in a moment.

A second class of negative states includes those experienced regularly though not daily or by all.  Itches, allergies, colds, fevers, infections, menstrual cramps, hot flashes, and so on. And then, beyond physical sensations there are the various frustrations and irritations of life: waiting in lines, having to put up with the bad behavior of others, traffic jams, boring work, loneliness, unrequited love, betrayals, jealousies, the list goes on.

But even these things are not that bad.  If we stop here we don't have much of an argument for the claim that the quality of all our lives, even the lives of the luckiest, is objectively bad.

When we get to the really horrific events and setbacks, Benatar's case gains in credibility. Cancer and the miseries attendant upon its treatment, clinical depression, rape and murder and the tortures of the gulag, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and so much else bespeak the poor quality of human life.  And don't think only of the present; consider also the horrors of the long past of humanity. Anyone who without blinkers surveys these miseries must admit that the quality of human life for many or most is very bad indeed.  People like Roberto Benigni who gush over how wonderful life is, what a gift it is, etc. should be made to visit insane asylums, prisons, torture chambers, and battlefields.  And even if my life is good, how good can it be given that I am aware of the horrific fates of others and that it is possible that I end up where they are?

But surely many are fortunate and escape the evils just enumerated and their like.  So we still don't have a good argument for the extreme thesis that every human life is such that the objectively bad outweighs the objectively good.

But is There More Bad Than Good?

Benatar returns an affirmative answer: "There is much more bad than good even for the luckiest humans." (77) So no matter how well-situated you are, your life is objectively more bad than good, and if you think otherwise then your assessment of the quality of your life is biased and inaccurate.

The first consideration Benatar adduces is the empirical fact that "the most intense pleasures are short-lived, whereas the worst pains can be much more enduring." (77)  There is chronic pain but no chronic pleasure. Then there is the fact that the worst pains are worse than the best pleasures are good. (77). No one would trade an hour of the worst torture for an hour of the best pleasure. A third fact is that in a split second one can be severely injured, "but the resultant suffering can last a lifetime." (78) And then there is the long physical decline of the mortal coil, and the frustration of desires and aspirations, and the constant toiling and moiling, striving and struggling, that life involves to keep the whole thing going.  We are effortlessly ignorant, "but knowledge usually requires hard work." (80)  We value knowledge and longevity, but can realize these values only to a tiny extent. We are far closer to nescience than to omniscience.

Why Do We Fail to Notice the Preponderance of the Bad?

In short, the bad preponderates and for all. Why do we fail to notice the heavy preponderance of the bad in human life? Because we have accommodated to the human condition. (82) "Longevity, for example, is judged relative to the longest actual human lifespans and not relative to an ideal standard."

And similarly with respect to knowledge, understanding, and moral goodness.  We measure ourselves against the human baseline and not against an ideal standard. This is why we fail to notice that the bad outweighs the good.  If the standard of knowledge is the human baseline, then your humble blogger feels good about himself; but if the standard is omniscience, then he must sadly confess that he knows next to nothing.  And while he fancies himself a better man than most, he owns to being an utter wretch, morally speaking, in comparison to Moral Perfection itself.  In religious terms, we are all sinners in the eyes of God, and the moral differences between us shrink into insignificance relative to the divine standard of holiness. 

Towards a Critique

At this juncture we need to ask again: How can anything be devalued relative to a nonexistent standard? If God exists, then we are by comparison miserably defective in every way. But Benatar's metaphysical naturalism rules out the existence of God along with such other entities as Platonic Forms and the Plotinian One.  For on a full-throated naturalism the real is exhausted by space-time and its contents. So neither Omniscience nor Moral Perfection nor the Form of Justice, etc., exist. There is nothing supernatural whether concrete or abstract. The New Testament exhortation, "Be ye perfect as your heavenly father is perfect," (Matthew 5:48) presupposes for its very sense the existence of a perfect heavenly father. If there is no such being, then the exhortation is empty. 

On metaphysical naturalism, the normative, if it is to be objective, can only be grounded in natural facts independent of our subjective attitudes. For on metaphysical naturalism, there can be no existing ideal standards for a species of living thing except actual perfect specimens. But any actual perfect specimen, whether leonine, human, whatever, will fall short of Benatar's demands.  Even the best human specimen will be limited in longevity, knowledge, moral goodness, and the rest.

My point is that Benatar's ideal standards, without which he cannot denigrate as bad even the most fortunate of human lives, are merely excogitated or thought up  by him: they can have no basis in physical or metaphysical reality given his naturalism.  It seems to me that to fall short of a standard that is nowhere realized and has never been realized is not to fall short.  But the point is stronger when put modally: to fall short of a standard impossible of realization is not to fall short.  A lion without claws is a defective lion; he falls short of the standard, a standard that actually exists in non-defective lions. But a lion that cannot learn to speak Italian is not a defective lion since it is nomologically impossible that lions learn human languages. 

One can imagine a cat that talks, and wouldn't the world be better if we could speak to our pets? But neither imaginability nor conceivablity entail real possibility, and if a state of affairs is not really possible, then no actual state of affairs can be devalued relative to it.  It is not bad that cats can't talk. And it is not bad, give that human beings are just a highly-evolved species of land mammal, that they can't know everything or live to be a thousand years old. Thus it is no argument against the quality of human life that it falls short of a standard that is nowhere realized but is merely dreamed up as an empty logical possibility.

What Benatar is doing is a bit like complaining that turkeys don't fly around ready-roasted.  That is no argument in denigration of the value of turkeys because it is nomologically impossible that turkeys fly around ready-roasted.  Similarly, it is no argument against the value of human life that human longevity maxes out at about 122 years.  

Generalizing: if it is impossible that a state of affairs S obtain, there is no actual state of affairs T such that T is devalued by S.

The objection I am making is conditional upon the acceptance of naturalism. Given that Benatar accepts naturalism, he is in no position to argue that every human life, even the best, is objectively bad.   

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Life and Thought

David Benatar on the Quality of Human Life, Part I

This is the fourth in a series on David Benatar's The Human Predicament (Oxford UP, 2017). This entry covers pp. 64-71 of Chapter  Four, pp. 64-91, entitled "Quality."

The Meaning Question and the Quality Question

These are different questions. Although for Benatar no human life has what he calls "cosmic" meaning, a life can have a high degree of what he calls "terrestrial" meaning even if its quality is low, and a life can have a low degree of terrestrial meaning even if its quality is high. The life of Nelson Mandela, for example, had a high degree of terrestrial meaning despite its low quality due to his long incarceration.  On the other hand, "The meaningless life of a jet-setting playboy millionaire might be regarded as a life of high quality (by some)." (66)

Though distinct, meaning and quality are related.  If I feel my life to be meaningful, then this feeling will enhance its quality whether or not my life really is meaningful. Conversely if I feel my life to be meaningless. Or suppose the quality of my life degrades drastically. This may cause me to question its meaning.  If one's life is of high quality, however, this is no guarantee that one will not question its meaning.

Benatar's Thesis on the Quality of Life

The common view is that while some lives are on balance bad, others are on balance good. Benatar rejects the common view holding that "while some lives are better than others, none are (noncomparatively or objectively) good." (67) No human life, then, is good, not even the best life.  This is a very strong thesis. Benatar is not telling us that many or most human lives are objectively bad, but that every single instance of human life is objectively bad. Some lives are worse than others but all are objectively bad. One can appreciate how this will feed into his anti-natalism.

An Obvious Objection

One might object that the sole authority on the quality of one's life is the liver of that life. As a philosophizing gastroenterologist once said, "It all depends on the liver." (Is the James attribution to the left accurate? Paging Dave Lull!) So if my life seems to me to be good, then it is good, and no one can tell me otherwise. How could one be mistaken about the quality of one's own life? If the quality of one's life is the felt quality thereof, the quality as it appears to the subject of the life, and the felt quality is good, then it would make no sense to say that the quality is in reality worse than the subject feels it to be and that one is mistaken about the quality of one's life.

If, on the other hand, one meant by the quality of a human life a wholly objective feature that it has, irrespective of the thoughts, feelings, and attitudes of the subject or  'liver' of the life, then one could be mistaken about its quality. But obviously the quality of a life is not a wholly objective feature of it.  This is because a human life concretely understood is a lived live, a conscious and self-conscious life, a life from a point of view, a felt life, a life in which subjectivity and objectivity are blended in such a way as to be teased apart only by a process of abstraction that is arguably falsifying.

Clearly, quality of life is neither wholly subjective nor wholly objective.  Not wholly subjective, because we have animal bodies that are parts of the physical world. Not wholly objective, because we are conscious and self-conscious beings.  Given this blending of subjective and objective, the question is whether there is nonetheless an objective fact of the matter as to the quality of one's life.

Response to the Objection: Judgments About Quality are Unreliable

Benatar tells that there are three psychological phenomena that impair self-assessment of well-being.

a) Optimism Bias. People tend to see themselves as happier than they really are. One reason is that people tend to suppress negative memories. Another is that people are irrationally prone to think that good things will happen to them in the future. Because of optimism bias, subjective assessments of well-being are unreliable.

b) Adaptation. Suppose something very bad happens: you lose the use of your legs. Your subjective  self-assessment of well-being drops precipitously. "In time, however, subjective assessment of quality of life will improve as one adjusts to the paralysis." (69) And this despite the fact that one's objective condition has not improved. The point, them, is that the subjective assessment of well-being does not accurately track one's objective quality of life and is therefore unreliable.

c) Comparison. Subjective assessments of well-being and quality of life involve comparisons with others. Suppose you note that you are no worse off than many others. This contributes to the illusion that the bad features of all human lives are not as bad as they actually are.  If what I just written is less than clear, it is because what Benatar wrote at the bottom of p. 69 is less than clear.

The main point, however, is clear. Benatar is claiming that for most of us our subjective assessments of well-being are inaccurate and tend toward the optimistic. Most of us fail to see that the quality of our lives is worse than we think it is.  It doesn't follow from this, however, that the quality of our lives is very bad. To show this requires a second step. I will discuss the second step in a subsequent post. What we now must decide is whether Benatar's response to the objection is tenable.

Can One Be Mistaken About the Quality of One's Life? Is There an Objective Fact of the Matter?

Benatar is telling us that for most of us the quality of our lives is objectively worse than we think it is. The objection above was that my life has the quality I feel it to have, and that about this I cannot be mistaken.  Benatar's response, however, seems merely to beg the question by assuming that one can be mistaken about the quality of one's life.  By assuming that one can be mistaken, Benatar assumes that there is some objective fact of the matter about the quality of one's life and of human life generally. Benatar assumes that each human life has an objective quality that is what it is regardless of what the agent of that life believes or feels. But that is precisely what is denied by someone who holds that the subjectively felt quality of one's life is partially constitutive of the quality of one's life.

The latter view can be defended.

One thing we can all agree on is that objective factors bear upon the quality of one's life. These are factors that don't depend on what we feel or how we think or what our attitudes are.  No matter how stoically I endure a sprained ankle, the objective fact is that the ankle is sprained. Equally true, however, is that if I were an insentient robot with a sprained ankle, there would be no point to talk of the quality of my life.  A robot, not being alive, has no quality of life. Quality of life is felt quality just as life is sentient life. Quality in this discussion has an ineliminable subjective component.  Quality of life includes both an objective and a subjective component.  This reflects the fact that I am not merely an object in the physical world, but also a subject who experiences his being an object in the physical world open to its rude impacts.

I submit that what I have just said is part of the non-negotiable data of the problem. If so, it is hard to see how one's life could have an objective quality independent of what one feels and thinks.

Imagine two physically indiscernible hikers on a hike together. Each sprains his left ankle in the same way at the same time. The physical damage is the same in both cases. But the hikers differ in their attitudes toward their injuries. The one is a philosopher who has practiced Buddhist and Stoic mind control techniques. He is adept at mastering aversion. The other is  a person who wails and complains and exaggerates the badness of the negative event.  He blames his partner for hiking too fast or for taking him on a route that is rocky and dangerous, etc.  He makes things worse for himself with his negative attitude.  Clearly, the quality of life of the second hiker is worse than that of the first at the time of the accident.  And this despite the sameness of objective conditions.

This seems to cast doubt on the idea that one could be mistaken about the quality of one's life.  I grant of course that one could be mistaken about the objective factors bearing upon the quality of one's life. In the above example, I might not realize the severity of the sprain, or I might mistake a bone fracture for a sprain. But if the quality of one's life is compounded of both objective and subjective elements,  it is hard to see how I could be subject to correction by an outsider observer. 

A Temporal Consideration

Benatar speaks of the "overall quality of one's life." Part of what he means by this is the quality of one's life as a temporal whole including past, present, and future. Whether or not a person is a primary substance in Aristotle's sense, a person's life is a process and thus a whole of temporal parts or phases. The past phases are subjectively real only in memory, and the future phases only in anticipation. The present alone counts for my happiness. From the lived first-person perspective, if I am happy now, then I am happy.  One cannot be tenselessly happy. Whether or not in general to exist = to exist now as presentists in the philosophy of time maintain, our mode of existence is such that to exist = to exist now.  

If so, one is well-advised to avoid dwelling on negative memories.  For they adversely affect the only happiness there is, the happiness of the present.  And this is what most happy and healthy people do: they either forget the past insofar as it was painful, or they learn to regard it with cool detachment, preseving its lessons, but without affect.    In this way they enhance the happiness of the present.  And similarly with regard to future ills. They hope for the best and prepare for the worse, but without worry.

If I suppress negative memories, thereby enhancing the quality of my life, does this lead to an inaccurate assessment of the quality of my life? Only if my life is a whole each phase of which is equally real. Then, to have an accurate objective view I would have to consider each phase of my life past, present, and future. I would have to adopt an atemporal perspective on a life which is essentially temporal.  But such a perspective is falsifying.  My life wells up moment by moment in a moving present: my mode of existence is not tenseless but essentially tempotal.  The present phase alone is subjectively real and relevant to happiness or well-being.

So one could say that the suppression of negative memories (which, qua memorial acts, are in the present) is just good happiness-hygiene, and not the source of an inaccurate view of the quality of my life as a whole.  There is no such thing as my life as a whole except by a falsifying abstraction from my lived life in the standing-streaming present. Hence there is no objective fact of the matter concerning my life as a whole.

I should think that the philosophizing gastroenterologist is right in the end: the quality of one's life depends on the liver and his attitudes and mental hygiene. 

Life and Thought

The tension between life and thought is a very old theme of mine, from the painfully intense youthful days when I read Hermann Hesse's Narcissus and Goldmund and Steppenwolf and all the others. I rehearsed the theme once again the other night in the nocturnal twilight zone between deep sleep and wakefulness. Strange and exasperatingly elusive thought-forms patrol that penumbral region.

Life is one-sided, self-assertive, self-servingly particular, hierarchical and tribal. Life is in every case this bit of life, or that, here and now, limited and conditioned. Thought, however, aims at truth  which, if it exists, is by its very nature objective, impersonal, universal, non-perspectival, and not in the service of any particular individual or group. Thought is receptive, not willful, oriented toward what is, open, feminine. And thus in tension with life's will-driven self-assertion. The truth-seeking soul, like the religious soul, is a feminine soul even if masculine will drives its seeking.

My youthful worry was that thought weakens us, making us less fit for animal and social existence. Moral scruples impede action. The potential endlessness of thought opposes the decisiveness of action. He who acts cuts off reflection; he de-cides. Look before you leap, but he who hesitates is lost. Our spiritual nature, including reason, is anti-life.   It is of the endlessness and fluidity of the sea; he who swims in it overmuch is unfitted for life on solid ground and may drown in its depths.

Geist als der Widersacher der Seele, to press a Ludwig Klages title into service. The soul, as the principle of life, is at odds with spirit.

It is a dark vision and it worries me. But is it true? Or just an expression of a certain sort of perverse form of life?  If the latter, then it can't be true, given what truth is. 

This side of the Great Divide I do not expect any resolution of the tension between life and thought. I don't expect the resolution of any tensions. The philosopher seeks the One and the coincidentia oppositorum. But the living mystical One he craves, the final synthesis that cancels while preserving and preserves while canceling, is an Aufhebung unavailable here below, pace the Swabian genius.  Discursive reason to which he is tied vouchsafes him only the abstract One, the Hegelian night in which all cows are black.

This life is a kaleidoscopic confusion of tensions and conflicts on multiple levels from the intra-psychic to the macro-cosmic. It is to me nowadays mostly fascinating and the struggle to untangle it exhilirating. It no longer depresses me. And when rarely it does, death wears the kindly visage of the Great Releaser.

But this too is a contested notion as we shall see when we examine David Benatar's thought on the matter. He does not accept the Epicurean reasoning. Our predicament is a vise in which we are squeezed between life which is bad, and death, which is also bad.  The Reaper is grim; he is no Benign Releaser.  There is no escape once you are born. Not a pleasant thought. The 'solution' is not to be born. 

This side of the Great Divide it's a bloody tangle from every angle. 

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David Benatar in The New Yorker

This New Yorker piece is worth reading. (HTs: Dave Lull, Karl White)  It helps clarify Benatar's anti-natalism. 

One feature of his position is that death is no solution to the human predicament.  As I would put it, the Grim Reaper is not a Benign Releaser. For while life is bad, so is death.  Not just dying, but being dead. His arguments for this in Chapter 5 of The Human Predicament are fascinating.  I will examine them in due course in my series on Benatar's book. I agree that dying is bad, but not being dead.

People sometimes ask themselves whether life is worth living. Benatar thinks that it’s better to ask sub-questions: Is life worth continuing? (Yes, because death is bad.) Is life worth starting? (No.)

One can see from this that Benatar's position is a nuanced one, and that it is a miserable psychologizing cheap-shot to protest, "Well, if life is so bad, why don't you just kill yourself." That is a perfectly stupid response for two reasons. First, if death is bad, then death is no solution. Benatar describes the human predicament as an existential vise: we are under squeeze both from life and from death.  Second,  Benatar is a  philosopher: he aims to get at the truth of the matter; he is not emoting like the cheap-shot man who is not comfortable with what Benatar believes the truth to be.

A second feature of Benatar's position is that his is not a misanthropic anti-natalism, but a compassionate anti-natalism:

For misanthropic anti-natalists, the problem isn’t life—it’s us. Benatar, by contrast, is a “compassionate anti-natalist.” His thinking parallels that of the philosopher Thomas Metzinger, who studies consciousness and artificial intelligence; Metzinger espouses digital anti-natalism, arguing that it would be wrong to create artificially conscious computer programs because doing so would increase the amount of suffering in the world. The same argument could apply to human beings.

As I read Benatar, his view is that life itself is the problem, insofar as life involves sentience.  So it would be better if all life ceased to exist, which of course includes human life. He is an anti-natalist with respect to all living things, not just humans. 

A further clarification that just now occurs to me, and one with which I think Benatar would agree, is that he is axiologically anti-natalist across the board inasmuch as he holds that it would be better if all life, insofar as it involves sentience, cease to exist. But he is ethically anti-natalist only with respect to humans for the obvious reason that only the latter can have a moral obligation not to procreate.

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Can Belief in Man Substitute for Belief in God?

A slightly redacted re-post from 26 September 2009. 

.................................... 

The fact and extent of natural and moral evil make belief in a providential power difficult. But they also make belief in man and human progress difficult. There is the opium of religion, but also the opium of the intellectuals, the opium of future-oriented utopian naturalisms such as Marxism. Why is utopian opium less narcotic than the religious variety?

And isn’t it more difficult to believe in man than in God? We know man and his wretchedness and that nothing much can be expected of him, but we don’t know God and his powers.  Man is  impotent to ameliorate his condition in any fundamental way.

We have had centuries to experience this truth, have we not? Advances in science and technology have brought undeniable benefits but also unprecedented dangers. The proliferation of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, their possession by rogue states and their terrorist surrogates, bodes ill for the future of humanity. As I write these lines, the prime minister of a Middle Eastern state calls brazenly and repeatedly for the destruction of another Middle Eastern state while the state of which he is the prime minister prepares the nuclear weapons to carry out the unspeakably evil deed.  Meanwhile the rest of the world is complacent and appeasing.  We know our ilk and what he is capable of, and the bases of rational optimism seem slim indeed.

There is also the scarcely insignificant point that there is no such thing as Man, there are only individual men, men  at war with one another and with themselves.  We are divided, divisive, and duplicitous creatures.  But God is one. You say God does not exist? That may be so.

But the present question is not whether God exists or not, but whether belief in Man makes any sense and can substitute for belief in God. I say it doesn't and can’t, that it is a sorry substitute if not outright delusional. We need help that we cannot provide for ourselves, either individually or collectively. The failure to grasp this is of the essence of the delusional Left, which, refusing the tutelage of tradition and experience, and having thrown overboard every moral standard,  is ever ready to spill oceans of blood in pursuit of their utopian fantasies.

There may be no source of the help we need. Then the conclusion to draw is that we should get by as best we can until Night falls, rather than making things worse by drinking the Left's utopian Kool-Aid.

Cosmic Meaninglessness and the Theistic Gambit

This is the third in a series on David Benatar's The Human Predicament (Oxford UP, 2017). This entry covers pp. 35-45 of Chapter 3.

The good news from Chapter 2 was that there is meaning at the terrestrial level. The bad news from Chapter 3 is that there is none at the cosmic level, or from the cosmic perspective. Cosmic meaning is meaning from the perspective of the universe.  Of course, the universe does not literally have a perspective or point of view: it is not an experiencing subject. But one can usefully speak as if it did. (35)

I object, though, to Benatar's calling the cosmic view the view sub specie aeternitatis.  From the point of view of eternity, the cosmos, as unimaginably vast as it is, is not ultimate or absolute. For one thing, it is modally contingent: it exists but might not have. It is also finite in the past direction as per current cosmology.  It is certainly not eternal or necessary. Given that the cosmos is not eternal, its point of view cannot be the point of view of eternity. The cosmos is not causa sui or the ground of its own being. Its point of view is not the widest of all wide-angle points of view. From the point of view of eternity, there might not have been any cosmos, any physical universe, at all. Thus there is a wider point of view than the cosmic point of view, namely God's point of view. It alone is the view sub specie aeternitatis.   The point of view of eternity is the eternal God's point of view and he alone views things under the aspect of eternity.  

It is obvious that one can speak of God's point of view without assuming the existence of God: it is the point of view that God would have if God existed.  We can avoid all reference to God by saying that the view sub specie aeternitatis is the ultimate point of view, the view of Being or of truth. The truth is the ultimate way things are. I tap into the ultimate point of view when I think the thought: there might have been no physical universe at all. I am able to do this despite my being a measly bit of the world's fauna.

In any case, Benatar's claim is that human life has no meaning when viewed cosmically, from what he thinks is the ultimate point of view, that of the universe, but which I claim is not the ultimate point of view.

Why does human life (both at the individual and species levels) have no cosmic meaning? His main point is that we humans "have no significant impact on the broader universe." (36) He means the universe beyond the Earth. "Nothing we do on earth has any effect beyond it." (36) This is true, apart from some minor counterexamples, but trivial. Or so it seems to me. Why should the lack of causal impact of the earthlings on the wider universe argue the ultimate meaninglessness of their existence?  It strikes me as very strange to tie existential meaning to causal impact. 

Suppose earthlings were everywhere in the universe and could have an impact everywhere. That would not show that their lives have meaning. The earthlings might ask: "We are everywhere but why are we anywhere? Why do we exist?" Our lack of cosmic impact cannot show that our lives lack meaning if maximal causal impact is consistent with meaninglessness.   It is worth noting that size does not matter either. If we human animals were many times larger than we are and had the causal impact of elephants or dinosaurs, how would that augment our meaning?  Suppose I am the biggest, baddest hombre in the entire universe. Suppose I am omni-located within it, able to affect every part of it.  I could still ask: But why do I exist?  For what purpose?

Benatar points out that we won't exist for long and that this is true for the species and for individuals. (36) True, but again how is this relevant to the question of existential meaning?  Suppose humans always existed. This would not add one cubit of meaning to the meaning of the individual or the species. So the fact that we do not last long either as individuals or as a species does not argue lack of meaning. Duration matters as little as size.

One of the puzzles here is why Benatar should tie existential meaning to causal impact. But he also speaks of our lack of purpose.

The Theistic Gambit

For Benatar, "The evolution of life, including human life, is a product of blind forces and serves no apparent purpose." (36) To which a theist might respond with a Baltimore catechism type of answer, "God made us to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in the next."  Our ultimate purpose, on this scheme, is to share in the divine life and achieve final felicity. 

Benatar gives a strange argument against the coherence of the theistic scheme:

Even in the best-case scenario, it is hard to understand why God would create a being in order to prepare it for an afterlife given that no afterlife would be needed or desired if the being had not been created in the first place. [. . .] The sort of meaning that the afterlife provides cannot explain why God would have created us at all. (39)

While it is true that only beings who already exist could want or need an afterlife, it is a non sequitur to conclude that it is no explanation of why we exist in the first place to say that we exist in order to share in the divine life.  God wants to share his super-effulgent being, consciousness, and bliss and so he creates free beings with the capacity to participate in the divine life.  If that is true, then it explains why we exist in the first place.

Of course, we don't know that it is true, and we cannot prove that God exists or that we have a destiny beyond this brief animal life. But the naturalist is in the same boat: he cannot prove that God does not exist and that human life is a product of blind forces. Benatar movingly describes animal pain and the horror of nature red in tooth and claw (42-44). Considerations such as these should put paid to any pollyanish conceit that life is beautiful.  And yet they are not compelling or conclusive. While it is reasonable to be a naturalist, it is also reasonable to be a theist.  Neither side can refute the other, and one's subjective certainty counts for nothing.

One of the things I like about Benatar is that he draws the pessimistic consequences of naturalism.  Most naturalists compartmentalize: in their studies and offices they are naturalists who reject God and the soul and ultimate meaning; at home, however, with their families and bourgeois diversions they are happy and optimistic.  But given their theoretical views, what entitles them to their happiness and optimism? Nothing that I can see. They are living in a state of self-deception.

Benatar lives his atheism: he has existentially appropriated his theoretical convictions and drawn the consequences. (Not that atheism by itself entails anti-natalism.) But is it practically possible to live as an atheist?  W. L. Craig thinks not. See his The Absurdity of Life Without God. Benatar, needless to say, is not impressed by Craig's reasoning. (44).

Speaking for myself, if I KNEW that I was nothing but a complex physical system slated for anihilation in a few years, I would be sorely tempted to walk out into the deseert and blow my brains out, my devotion to my wife being the only thing holding me back.  Why hang around for sickness, old age and a death out of one's control? And it is not because my life isn't good; it is very good. I have achieved the happiness that eluded me in younger years. But if one appreciates what naturalism entails, then all the mundane goodness and middle-sized happiness in the world is ultimately meaningless.

It is my reasonable belief that I am not a mere complex physical system slated for annihilation that adds zest and ultimate purpose to my life.  I keep on because there is reason to hope, not only within this life, but beyond it as well.  

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Maverick Philosopher: Is Life a Predicament?

David Benatar, <i>The Human Predicament</i>, Chapter 2, Meaning

Maverick Philosopher: David Benatar, The Human Predicament, Introduction

The Question of the Meaning of Life: Distinctions and Assumptions (2017)

David Benatar, The Human Predicament, Chapter 2, Meaning

This is the second in a series of entries on Benatar's new book. The entries are collected here. Herewith, some notes on pp. 13-34. Summary does not constitute endorsement. Note also that my summary involves interpretation and extension and embellishments: I take the ball and run with it on occasion.

The sense that one's life is insignificant or pointless has several sources.  There is the brevity of life, its insecurity and contingency, and its apparent absurdity.

Our lives are short and they transpire on a tiny planet in a huge universe that doesn't care about us. Add to this the extreme unlikelihood of any particular biological individual's coming into existence in the first place. Had my father been killed in the War, I wouldn't exist. Had my parents never met, I wouldn't exist. Had my parents not had sex in the month in which I was conceived, I wouldn't exist. (Benatar endorses as I do Kripke's Essentiality of Origin thesis.) I could not have sprung from any pair of gametes other than the exact pair from which I did spring. Iterate these considerations back though my lineage. Had my paternal grandfather died while playing with dynamite as a boy, then my father wouldn't have existed. And so on.

But while my coming to be was exceedingly unlikely, my ceasing to exist is dead certain. "We are doomed from the start." (14) The probability that I should have come to be at all was vanishingly small; I am (metaphysically) contingent at every moment of my existence; my death is (nomologically) necessary.

And then there is the sense of absurdity that can arise when we step back and observe our doings and those of others from outside. We take ourselves with great seriousness.  Injustices, slights, accomplishments, projects seem so real to us if they involve us.   But how real can they be when we will all soon be dead?  

Suppose I recall some bitter conflict between long dead relatives. Who cares about that any more? It was intensely real to the parties involved, it consumed them at the time, but now I alone remember it, without affect, and when I am gone no one will remember it. How significant was it if it will soon be encairned in oblivion?  The rich personal pasts of trillions who have gone before are as nothing now. They are now nothing to anybody. All those complicated inner tapestries of longing and fear and memory -- all now nothing to anybody.

You say the past WAS and always will have been?  I'm enough of a realist to grant that. But a past beyond all memory is next to nothing.

An old tombstone depicts dates of birth and death with a dash separating them. That bare dash represents the details of a life that is now nothing to anybody. (15, n.3) I would add that the 'proper' name on the tombstone, 'Patrick J. McNally,' say, is as common as can be. Every tombstone soon comes to memorialize no one in his ownmost particular particularity.

Understanding the Question

What exactly are we asking about when we ask about the meaning of human life?  For some the question is the same as the question whether life is absurd. But what is it for life to be absurd? On Thomas Nagel's famous account, absurdity arises from "the collision between the seriousness with which we take our lives and the perpetual possibility of regarding everything about which we are serious as arbitrary, or open to doubt." (Nagel as quoted by Benatar, p. 20)

Nagel's account of absurdity implies that the life of a mouse cannot be absurd because mice are incapable of adopting an external perspective on their lives.  But it also implies that the life of a human who contingently fails ever to take up the external perspective cannot be absurd either.  Benatar, however, maintains that a man's life can be absurd even if he does not recognize it as such. He has us imagine a mindless bureaucratic paper shuffler whose life is arguably absurd even though he never adopts Nagel's external perspective in a way to induce a collision between the seriousness with which he takes his job and its arbitrarity and dubiousness.

Benatar's point is in part terminological. He proposes to use 'absurd' and 'meaningless' interchangeably.  On such a use of terms, a man's life can be Benatar-absurd without being Nagel-absurd.  Your life can be absurd or meaningless whether you know it or not. There is a fact of the matter; it does not depend on what view you take. You cannot avoid meaninglessness by sticking to (what I call) short views and avoiding (what I call) long ones. (See Long Views and Short Views: Is Shorter Better?) Many people are better off not taking long views and thinking heavy thoughts. It would be too depressing for them. But philosophers want to know. For them, sticking to short views is a miserable evasion. 

But what is a meaningful life? It is a life that has "impact." (23) Benatar seems to use this terms as synonymous with "purpose" and "significance." (23)  "A meaningful life is one that transcends one's own limits and significantly impacts others or serves purposes beyond oneself." (18)  Question for  Benatar: must the impact on others be of positive value?  Caligula's impact on others was considerable but of overall negative value. Can a theory of existential meaning be axiologically neutral?  Or must we say that an objectively meaningful life must be one whose influence on others is positive?

Impact is a matter of degree and so meaning is a matter of degree (23).  But there are also levels to consider.  We need to distinguish cosmic meaning from terrestrial meaning. Your life may have no cosmic meaning but possess some terrestrial meaning. Benatar is not a total meaning nihilist. Cosmic meaning is meaning from the point of view of the whole universe. Terrestrial meaning is either meaning from the point of view of humanity, or meaning from the point of view of some human grouping such as nation, tribe, community or family, or meaning from the point of view of the individual.

Subjective and Objective Meaning

This is an important distinction. If your life feels meaningful to you, i. e., if it is subjectively meaningful, it may or may not be objectively meaningful.  One could of course refuse to make this distinction. One could hold that the only (existential as opposed to linguistic) meaning there is is subjective meaning.  If your life seems meaningful, then it is, and there is no sense in asking about some supposed objective meaning. Benatar, however, thinks that subjective and objective meaning can come apart.

He invokes Richard Taylor's example of a Sisyphus-like character, call him Sisyphus II, in whom the gods have mercifully implanted an irrational impulse to roll stones. (25) Sisphyus II finds it immensely meaningful to roll a heavy rock to the top of a hill, let it roll down again, and then repeat the performance ad infinitum.  Benatar's intution, and mine as well, is that such a life, while subjectively satisfying, is objectively meaningless.  And the same goes for the beer can collectors and all who devote their lives to trivial pursuits.  A subjectively meaningful life can be objectively meaningless.

On a hybrid theory of existential meaning, a life is meaningful only if it is both subjectively and objectively meaningful. Benatar denies, however, that subjective meaningfulness is a necessary condition of a meaningful life.  Franz Kafka's life was objectively meaningful, due to his literary and cultural influence or "impact," but apparently not subjectively meaningful to Kafka who had ordered that his writings be burned at his death, an order that was fortunately not carried out.  Benatar holds that Kafka's life was, on balance meaningful, contra the hybrid theory.

Benatar's primary interest is in objective meaning (27).  Given the cosmological and the three terrestrial perspectives, in which of these is human life objectively meaningful? 

In the following chapter, Benatar develops his thesis that cosmically our lives are objectively meaningless. But he generously allows us some terrestrial objective meaning.  

For an individual x to have objective meaning is suffices for this individual to have a "positive impact" (27) on some other individual y.  From the individual perspective of y, x's life has individual meaning. Except for a few radically isolated individuals, the lives of all have an "impact" on others.  What is troubling here is the slide from "positive impact" to "impact."   Presumably a positive impact is a good impact or influence.  Do only good impacts confer meaning, or will any old impact do? I am not clear as to what Benatar's view is here.

Moving up a level to that of the group or community, Benatar has no trouble showing that many individuals' lives are meaningful from from the perspective of a group such as the family.  The highest terrestrial level is that of humanity in general. Here too the lives of a number of individuals enjoy objective meaning.  Buddha, Socrates, Jesus, William Shakespeare, Florence Nightingale, Jonas Salk and many others are individuals whose lives enjoy objective meaning from the perspective of humanity at large.

The good news, then, is that at the three terrestrial levels, many human lives possess objective meaning. The bad news is that no one's life has cosmic meaning.

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The Question of the Meaning of Life: Distinctions and Assumptions (2017)

Is Life a Predicament?

My old friend Joe sent me a vitriolic statement in denunciation of David Benatar, both the man and his ideas. I will quote only a relatively benign portion of Joe's rant:

I do not experience life as a predicament but as a great gift. I am surrounded by love and beauty, and even have been able to create some small additional beauty in this world, in my work as an architect and designer. I am hardly unique. Other people have created beauty as well, it is not a rare thing . . . .

Has Benatar bothered to find people like myself? If he has, he is calling us liars. If he has not, then he is lazy.

[. . .]

I could go on. I basically despise people like him.

I would guess that Joe's response is not atypical of those outside of philosophy. Except for alienated adolescents, few if any like Benatar's pessimistic and anti-natalist message. I don't like it either, and I'm in philosophy.

But liking is not the point. What alone is relevant is whether a rational case can be made for Benatar's theses.  

I admire the man's courage, the clarity of this thinking, and his resolute grappling with the undeniably awful features of human and animal life.  Do I agree with him? No. Do I have good reasons for disagreeing with him? Well, I have until the end of May 2018 to assemble and articulate them. I have been invited to read a paper in Prague at a conference on anti-natalism. 

So I accept the challenge that Benatar's work presents. That's the philosophical way. Ordinary people are content to rely on upbringing and emotion; they believe what they believe and reject what they reject on little or no evidence. They stop their ears to contrary views. They are content to live lives largely unexamined.  

But our patron, the (Platonic) Socrates, maintained that the unexamined life is not worth living. (Plato, Apology, 38a) So let us examine this life. Should it show itself, upon examination, to be not worth living, then let us accept the truth and its practical consequences. We should be open to the possibility that the examination of life, without which this life is not worth living, may disclose to us that this life is indeed not worth living.

For now I discuss just two questions. Is life a predicament? Is life a gift?

Is Life a Predicament?

Benatar holds that the human condition is a predicament. I agree. But it depends on what exactly a predicament is. I would define a predicament as an unsatisfactory state of affairs that calls for some sort of solution or amelioration or redemption or escape. I would add, however, that the solution cannot be easy or trivial, but also not impossible. Thus I do not build insolubility into my definition of 'predicament.' This seems to accord with Benatar's understanding of the term. He tells us that "Real predicaments . . . are those in which there is no easy solution." (HP 94) He does does not say that real predicaments have no solutions.

Predicaments thus divide into the soluble and the insoluble. Is there a solution to the predicament of life? I say it is reasonable to hope that there is.  This is what Benatar denies. Three views, then.

Joe: The human condition is not a predicament.

Bill: The human condition is a predicament but there is, or it is reasonable to hope there is, a Way Out.

Ben: The human condition is a predicament and there is no Way Out.

Religion Implies that Life is a Predicament

My impression is that Joe has a religious sensibility. So I can appeal to him by appealing to it. According to Josiah Royce "the essential characteristic of religion" is the concern for salvation. Salvation from what? Let us listen to Royce from the Golden Age of American philosophy:

The higher religions of mankind -- religions such as Buddhism and Christianity -- have had in common this notable feature, namely, that they have been concerned with the problem of the Salvation of Man. This is sometimes expressed by saying that they are redemptive religions -- religions interested in freeing mankind from some vast and universal burden, of imperfection, of unreasonableness, of evil, of misery, of fate, of unworthiness, or of sin. (The Sources of Religious Insight, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1912, p. 8)

Life is a predicament, then, because we find ourselves under the "vast and universal burden" so eloquently described by Royce, a state of affairs that is obviously deeply unsatisfactory, from which we need salvation.

It may be that no religious or secular solution is availing, but that is consistent with life's being a predicament. For it may be an insoluble predicament.

On the other hand, life here below remains a predicament even if orthodox Christianity, say, is true, and sub specie aeternitatis all is well, Christ's passion has atoned for our sins, we are back in right relation to God, heaven awaits the faithful, every tear will be dried, justice will prevail with the punishment of the evil and the rewarding of the good, and this vale of tears will give way to the Beatific Vision.  Even if all of this is true, life here below remains a predicament.

For even if, in the end, from the point of view of eternity, all is well, that is not the case here and now. Hic et nunc man is homo viator: he is on the road, a lonesome traveller through a vale of sorrows, treading the via dolorosa, behind a veil of ignorance. He does not KNOW, he can only believe.  But with belief comes doubt and doubt brings torment.  He is ignorant of the ultimate why and wherefore and temptations tempt him from every direction.  This deep ignorance is part of what makes our condition a predicament, and thus unsatisfactory -- even if all will be well in the end.

Is Life a Gift?

My old friend tells me that he experiences life as a great gift. But of course others experience it in other ways, which shows that the mere experiencing of it this way or that proves nothing. Life cannot be both a great gift and a "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." One of these global perceptions must be non-veridical. 

If life is a gift, then there is a presumably an all-good Giver. No donation without a donor. But then whence all the horror?

It is said that there are no atheists in foxholes. Not true: there are theists who become atheists in foxholes. The imminence of death and the absurdity of the carnage around them seems to disclose to them their abandonment in an utterly godless and inhuman universe. It comes to them with the force of a revelation that their theistic beliefs were so much childish optimism.

On the other hand, there are those who when in such a Jaspersian  boundary situation have mystical experiences that seem to disclose to them the ultimate rightness of things and the reality of the Unseen Order.

Appeal to experiences, no matter how profound, does not resolve the the big questions. The tedious work of the philosophers, then, is needed to sort this all out, if it can be sorted out.

And that is what Benatar engages in whether or not one likes his conclusions. As I said, it is not a matter of liking or disliking. 

The Question of the Meaning of Life: Distinctions and Assumptions (2017)

What follows is a redacted version of a post from April, 2013. It will serve as a useful foil to my examination of David Benatar's The Human Predicament (Oxford UP 2017).

.............................................

What are we asking when we ask about the meaning of life?  Herewith, some preliminary distinctions.

Existential versus Linguistic Meaning

Those for whom meaning is primarily at home in the semantic domain might wonder whether it makes sense to speak of the meaning of a life or of the actions and projects and events that make up a life. But surely  it does make sense.  Pace some older writers, there is no category mistake or any other fallacy involved in asking about the meaning of human life, or what I will call existential meaning. When we ask philosophically about the meaning of  life we are asking about the ultimate and objective point, purpose, end, or goal of human willing and striving, if there is one.  We are asking whether there is an ultimate and objective point, and what it is. These questions about existential as opposed to linguistic meaning obviously make sense and there is no need to waste keystrokes defending their sense.  The days of a crabbed positivism are long gone.

That being said, the similarities and differences of existential and linguistic meaning are worth noting.  Two quick points. 

One is that a human life could be construed as a vehicle of linguistic meaning.  Suppose a misspent youth issues in a man’s life-long incarceration.  One might say of such a man, ‘His life shows that crime does not pay.’  This is a bit of evidence for the thesis that a life can have linguistic meaning: the miscreant’s life can be reasonably taken to express the proposition that crime does not pay.  There is also the phenomenon of meaningful gestures and looks.  There is the look that says, ‘I don’t believe a word you are saying.’ From some students I have received the  look that bespeaks, ‘I don’t believe a word you are saying, and you don’t either.’  So if looks and gestures can carry rather specific linguistic meanings, then perhaps lives can as well.  This is not to say that existential meaning is a species of linguistic meaning, but that there are analogies between them worth exploring. Indeed, if one were to assimilate one to the other, it would be more plausible to assimilate linguistic meaning to existential meaning.

The second point is that there is an analogy between the way in which context is essential for both linguistic and existential meaning.  Words and sentences have their meanings only in wider linguistic contexts. An individual life, too, has what meaning it has only in a wider social and perhaps even cosmic context.  This will be explored further below when a distinction is made between anthropic and cosmic existential meaning.

Teleological and Axiological Aspects of Existential Meaning

Teleology. Meaning bears a teleological aspect in that a meaningful life is a purpose-driven life.  It is difficult to see how a human life devoid of purposes could be meaningful, and indeed purposes organized by a central purpose such as advancing knowledge or alleviating suffering.  The central purpose must be one the agent freely and self-transparently chooses for himself, a condition that would not be satisfied by Sisyphus if the gods, to modify Taylor-style a classical example, had implanted in him a burning desire endlessly to roll stones. 

I should think that the dominating purpose must be both nontrivial and achievable.  A life devoted to the collecting of beer cans is purpose-driven but meaningless on the score of triviality while a life in quest of a perpetuum mobile is purpose-driven but meaningless on the score of futility.  But even if a life has a focal purpose that is freely and consciously chosen by the agent of the life, nontrivial, and achievable, this still does not suffice for meaningfulness.

Axiology. A meaningful life also bears an axiological aspect in that a meaningful life is one that embodies some if not a preponderance of positive non-instrumental value at least for the agent of the life.  A life wholly devoid of personal satisfaction cannot be called meaningful.  But even this is not enough.  The lives of some terrorists and mass murderers are driven by non-trivial and non-futile purposes and are satisfying to their agents.  We ought, however, to resist the notion that such lives are meaningful. A necessary condition of a life’s being meaningful is that it realize some if not preponderance of positive non-instrumental objective value.  A radically immoral life cannot be a meaningful life. Or so say I.

This might be reasonably questioned. According to Benatar, "A meaningful life is one that transcends one's own limits and significantly impacts others or serves purposes beyond oneself." (18) By this definition, the lives of Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot were meaningful, as Benatar grants. (19) Well, can a radically immoral life be a meaningful life? I say No; Benatar leaves the question open:

One response is to acknowledge that wicked lives can be meaningful, but then say that we should seek only positive meaning. Another option is to say that a life is not meaningful unless its purposes or ways of transcending limits are positive, worthy, or valuable. (19)

Restriction to Human Life

The question about the meaning of life is restricted  to human life.  We are not asking about the purpose of life in general. For what concerns us is not life as such, life in its full biological range, but our type of life, life that supports subjectivity, life that is lived from a subjective center, life that can express itself and question itself using the first-person singular pronoun as in the questions Who am I?  and Why am I here?  Human life is self-questioning life.  And as far as we know, only human life is self-questioning life. 

Life and Subjectivity

The restriction of the meaning question to human life is not a restriction to human life as a biological phenomenon but a  restriction to human subjectivity.  We must distinguish between the occurrence in nature of biologically human animals and human subjectivity, the subjectivity that encounters itself in human animals.  Our concern is not with the purpose of human animals but with the purpose of human existence, human subjectivity, human Dasein to use Heidegger’s term.  What is the purpose of my existence as a subject, as a conscious and self-conscious being whose Being is an issue for it?  Not: Why do human animals like me exist?  It might be better to speak of the meaning of consciousness rather than of the meaning of life.  What is the meaning of our being conscious with all that that entails: the positing of goals, the questioning of goals, the experiencing of moods, the being driven by desire while being haunted by conscience?

To appreciate the distinction between human life as a biological phenomenon and human subjectivity, note that the meaning question could arise even if one were not a human animal.  If I were a finite pure spirit, an angel, say, my living would not be a biological living but it would be a conscious and self-conscious living nonetheless.  A finite pure spirit could ask: Why do I exist? For what purpose?  What is the meaning of my life?  Imagine surviving your bodily death and finding yourself wondering about the point of your post-mortem existence.  Wondering about the meaning of your post-mortem  life you would not be wondering about the meaning of your biological  life or the purpose of your embodiment (since you are disembodied) but about your life as a pure spirit. 

But  I am now a human animal, and it may well be that my subjectivity cannot exist without the support of my human animality.   Nevertheless,  it is not the meaning (purpose) of the biological living of this animal that is me that I am inquiring into when I ask about the meaning of my life, but the meaning of my subjectivity, the meaning of my being a subject who lives in and though his projects and wonders about their ultimate point and purpose.  The body is the vehicle of my projects in this material world, and it may be that I cannot exist without this vehicle.  (I am certainly not identical to it.)  But the meaning question does not concern the purpose in nature of this animal that is my vehicle, but the purpose of my willing and striving as a subject of experience for whom there is a natural world.  The subject of experience is not just another object in the natural world, but precisely a subject for whom there is a natural world.  The intelligent reader will of course appreciate that nothing said above presupposes the truth of substance dualism in the philosophy of mind.

The Irreducibly Subjective Tenor of the Meaning Question

What the foregoing  implies is that the question about the meaning of human existence has an irreducibly subjective tenor.  It cannot be posed as a purely objective question about either the cause or the purpose of  the occurrence in nature of a certain zoological species.  If this is right, then we shouldn’t expect natural science to provide any insight into why we are here and what our existence means. We should not take the following oft-quoted passage from Stephen Hawking as having any relevance to our question:

However, if we discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable by everyone, not just by a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason -- for then we should know the mind of God. (A Brief History of Time, Bantam 1988, p. 175)

Total natural science, including evolutionary theory, is in a position to provide a causal explanation of  why we are here as members of a zoological species.  But even if natural science could tell us the purpose of the human species, it cannot give us any insight into why we exist if this question means: for what ultimate purpose do we individual subjects of experience exist? Hawking conflates the question of the ultimate meaning (purpose) of human existence with the question of the causal explanation of a certain zoological species. That is a mistake.  And this for two reasons. 

First, to assign a cause is not to assign a purpose.  Second, an animal species could have a purpose even if no specimen of that species has that purpose or any purpose.  There is a logical gap between ‘Species S has purpose P’ and ‘Each member of S has P.’ To think otherwise is to commit the Fallacy of Division. Suppose the purpose of the human species is to serve as food for a race of farsighted and very clever extraterrestrials who long ago interfered with evolution on Earth so as to have delectable provisions for an extraterrestrial delicatessen which is projected to come online in 2050.  On this scenario the human species has an objective purpose.  But it is not a purpose that could serve as the meaning of the life of any member of the human species.  Such a purpose is not subjectively appropriable.  It cannot be the meaning of my life to be eaten or to have progeny who will be eaten.  A purpose whose realization would destroy me or impede my flourishing or negate my dignity and autonomy is not a purpose that could serve as the meaning of my life. We will return to the topic of subjective appropriability.

In sum, the idiomatic ‘Why are we here?’ does not ask why certain organisms are on the Earth, or why certain organisms are parts of the physical universe. Nor does it ask about the purpose of an animal species.  It asks: What is the ultimate and objective, yet subjectively appropriable,  purpose of human subjectivity, if there is one?  To exist for a human being is to exist as a subject of experience; it is not to be a  mere object in a world of natural objects.  No adequate treatment of the meaning-of-life question can ignore the insights of the existentialists.

Anthropic and Cosmic Aspects of the Meaning Question

Although the question of the meaning of human existence has an irreducibly subjective tenor as just explained, there is no denying that the question has a ‘cosmic’ side in addition to its ‘human’ side.  A meaningful life is one that in some measure fits into a wider context and has its meaning in part supplied by that context.  Meaningfulness is connected with belongingness.  We feel our lives to be meaningful when we feel them as parts of something larger than ourselves.  Now the widest context is the world whole.  It embraces everything of every ontological category.  The world whole is the totality of what exists including God if God exists.  And we are parts of the world whole. Even if you understand that the agent and subject of a life is not identical to a specimen of a zoological species, you must grant that we as subjects of experience are parts of the world whole.  Since we are parts of the world whole, and the world whole is the widest context in which our lives unfold, the nature of the world whole cannot be unrelated  to the meaningfulness or lack thereof of human existence.  Thus the meaning-of-life question can be formulated ‘cosmically’ as follows: Is the world, the totality of what has being, of such a nature as to confer meaning and purpose, wholly or in part, on human life?  Relative to us, is the world benign, hostile, indifferent, or none of these?  Is the ultimate nature of the world such as to frustrate our purposes, as a cosmic pessimist would maintain, or such as to enable and further them, as the cosmic optimist would say?  Or neither?

Thus the meaning-of-life question can be formulated as a human or anthropic question but also as a ‘cosmic’ question.  Anthropic question: What is the objective purpose of human existence? Cosmic question: Is the nature of the world whole such as to enable and further the meaningfulness of human existence?

Exogenous versus Endogenous Meaning

Our problem concerns the objective meaning of human life in general, if any, and not the subjectively posited meaning of any particular human life, or the intersubjectively posited meaning of a group of particular human lives.  An objective meaning is one that is assigned by God or some other external agent or 'assigned'  by the nature of things, as opposed to one that is subjectively or intersubjectively posited.  Objective meaning is exogenous as opposed to endogenous.  It comes from without as opposed to from within.  For example, if the purpose of our lives is to live in accordance with God’s will, then our lives have a meaning that is objective inasmuch as it is assigned by God.  But even if there is no God as traditionally conceived, there could still be an objective meaning, one inscribed in the nature of things.  On the atheistic cosmic scheme of Buddhism, entry into Nirvana is the summum bonum, the ultimate end  (both goal and cessation) of all human striving.  Similar points could be made about Hinduism, Taoism, neo-Platonism and other systems.  Life could have an objective point even if there is no God.

Philosophical and Psychological Problems of the Meaning of Life

Suppose a person’s bipolar disorder renders his particular life subjectively meaningless.  That is compatible with life’s having an objective meaning.  It is equally obvious that life’s lacking an objective meaning is compatible with a particular life’s being subjectively meaningful.  Our question is the philosophical question about the objective meaning of human life in general, whether there is one and what it is.   It is not to be confused with any personal or psychological question.

There are existential drifters, directionless individuals whose lives are desultory because they cannot muster the motivation to pursue any definite goal.  Imagine a person who believes that the ultimate purpose of human existence is to attain Nirvana, but simply has no motivation to meditate, practice austerities, etc.  This person’s problem is psychological, not philosophical. This is not to deny that the philosophical problem cannot become a psychological problem for a given person.  A person who is led by philosophical inquiry from a naive belief in the meaning of life to a conviction of life’s absurdity might be plunged into debilitating mental anguish.  Compare this case to one in which a person arrives by philosophical means at a conviction of the absurdity of human existence and then calmly considers Camus’ question whether absurdity demands suicide as the only appropriate response.  If the person, disagreeing with Camus, decides that suicide is the proper response and commits the act, we should not say that his philosophical inquiry has induced in him a psychological problem, but that he has put into practice his theoretical conviction.  So when I insist that the meaning-of-life question is a philosophical, not a psychological, question, that is not to be taken as implying that it is a merely theoretical question with no possible practical upshot for an individual life.

Two Sides of the Philosophical Problem

Our question is not only a question about the objective meaning of human existence, but also a question about this very question, a question about its sense and solubility.  Call this the meta-side of the question.  It is our focus here.  I have just said something about the sense of the question.  The next step is to question its solubility.

Anti-Natalism, Zombies, and the Role of Consciousness in the Question of the Value of Life

Extreme anti-natalism is the view espoused by David Benatar according to which "it would be better if there were no more humans" (David Benatar and David Wasserman, Debating Procreation, Oxford UP 2015, 13). This is an axiological thesis. From it follows the deontic conclusion that "all procreation is wrong." (12)

Procreation is obviously a biological process. But in the case of humans, procreation is more than a merely biological process in that it leads to the production of extremely sensitive conscious and self-conscious individuals. Human procreation is an objective process in the world that leads to the production of subjects of experience for whom there is a world! If you don't find that astonishing, you are no philosopher. For as Plato taught, wonder is the feeling of the philosopher.

A Thought Experiment

Suppose one could keep (human) procreation going but that the offspring were no longer conscious. The offspring would react to stimuli and initiate chains of causation but have no conscious experiences whatsoever. It is conceivable that all biological processes including all the ones involved in procreation transpire 'in the dark.'

The idea is that at some point procreation becomes the procreation of genetically human zombies, as philosophers use the term 'zombie.' This is a learned usage, not a vulgar one.

A human zombie is a living being that is physically and behaviorally exactly like a living human being except that it lacks (phenomenal) consciousness.  Cut a zombie open, and you find exactly what you would find were you to cut a human being open. And in terms of linguistic and non-linguistic behavior, there is no way to tell a human being from a zombie. (So don't think of something sleepy, or drugged, or comatose or Halloweenish.) 

When a zombie sees a tree, what is going on in the zombie's brain is a 'visual' computational process, but the zombie lacks what a French philosopher would call interiority. There is no irreducible subjectivity, no irreducible intentionality, no qualitative feel to the 'visual' processing; there is nothing it is like for a zombie to see a female zombie or to desire her. (What's it like to be a zombie? There is nothing it is like to be a zombie.)  I suspect that Daniel Dennett is a zombie.  But I have and can have no evidence for this suspicion.  His denial of qualia is not evidence.  It might just be evidence of his being a sophist.  More to the point, his linguistic behavior and facial expressions could be just the same as those of a non-zombie qualia-denier. 

Zombies are surely conceivable whether or not they are possible. (We are conceiving them right now.) But if they are conceivable then it is conceivable that, starting tomorrow, human procreation proceed as usual except 'in the dark.' It is conceivable that future human offspring lack all  sentience and higher forms of consciousness.

On this scenario it might still be the case that it would have been better had we non-zombies never have been born, but it would not be the case that a convincing quality-of-life case could be made that "it would be better if there were no more humans" (David Benatar and David Wasserman, Debating Procreation, Oxford UP 2015, 13). For without consciousness, human life is devoid of felt quality.  No consciousness, no qualia. Without consciousness there is no suffering mental or physical or spiritual. And without these negatives, what becomes of the anti-natalist argument?

What my thought experiment seems to show is that what is problematic about human life is the consciousness associated with it, not life itself viewed objectively and biologically. If so, it is not the value of life that we question, but the value of consciousness.  So the problem is not that we were born (or conceived) but that we became conscious.

The Original Calamity?

If a philosopher can't speculate, who the hell can speculate? Could it be that the Original Calamity, the Fall of Man if you will, repeated in each one of us is the arisal of consciousness? Or perhaps the calamity is not the arisal of consciousness from the slime and stench of life, bottom up, but the entanglement of consciousness in the flesh, top down. Either way, embodied consciousness is the problem. This is a thought I had when I was 20 or so but lacked the 'chops' to articulate.  

The question now shifts to why the value of consciousness is in doubt.  Presumably consciousness is bad because of its objects and contents, not because it itself is bad.  Being conscious, as such, is presumably good. But consciousness -- this side of enlightenment --  is never without an (intentional) object or a (non-intentional) content. 

If consciousness were a pure beholding, a pure spectatorship, then perhaps consciousness would be an unalloyed good. Schopenhauer says that the world is beautiful to behold but terrible to be a part of. Things wouldn't be so bad if the beholding were transcendental to the world. But it is not: it is incarnated in the world.  Every beholding is a situated beholding. I am not a merely a transcendental spectator; I am also a bloody bit of nature's charnel house.  I am a prey to wolves human and non-human with all the mental and physical pain they bring, and prey to doubts about the sense and value of life with all the spiritual suffering they bring.

A Way Out?

If consciousness is contingently entangled in life, then there way be a way out, a path to salvation. Maybe there's a way to get clear of the samsaric crapstorm and step off of:

The wheel of the quivering meat conception . . . . . . I wish I was free of that slaving meat wheel and safe in heaven dead.  ( Jack Kerouac, Mexico City Blues, 1959, 211th Chorus).

Here is an anti-natalist passage from Kerouac's Buddhist period. From Some of the Dharma, Viking 1997, p. 175, emphasis added:

No hangup on nature is going to solve anything -- nature is bestial -- desire for Eternal Life of the individual is bestial, is the final creature-longing -- I say, Let us cease bestiality & go into the bright room of the mind realizing emptiness, and sit with the truth. And let no man be guilty, after this, Dec. 9 1954, of causing birth. -- Let there be an end to birth, an end to life, and therefore an end to death.  Let there be no more fairy tales and ghost stories around and about this.  I don't advocate that everybody die, I only say everybody finish your lives in purity and solitude and gentleness and realization of the truth and be not the cause of any further birth and turning of the black wheel of death.  Let then the animals take the hint, and then the insects, and all sentient beings in all one hundred directions of the One Hundred Thousand Chilicosms of Universes. Period.

Nature is the cause of all our suffering; joy is the reverse side of suffering.  Instead of seducing women, control yourself and treat them like sisters; instead of seducing men, control yourself and treat them like brothers.  For life is pitiful.

Stop.

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Thomas Nagel on the Mind-Body Problem