Maverick Philosopher

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.

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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

Related articles

Christian Anti-Natalism?

Anti-Natalism and the Search for Truth

More on Christian Anti-Natalism

David Benatar in <i>The New Yorker</i>

Maverick Philosopher: Anti-Natalism and Demographics

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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Maverick Philosopher: David Benatar on the Quality of Human Life, Part I

David Benatar in <i>The New Yorker</i>

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 <i>The New Yorker</i>

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.

Related articles

Thomas Nagel on the Mind-Body Problem

Prudential Anti-Natalism

Karl White writes:

If one assumes life has a negative value, or at the very least is a problem that needs solving, then surely it would follow that antinatalism is the prudential course. If we are unable to discern a meaning or a solution to life, then there can hardly be any justification for dragging someone else into said dilemma kicking and screaming (literally), while we attempt to work out our own salvation or lack thereof. That's why I subscribe to a form of prudential antinatalism. This differs from the kind that says life is and always a negative thing, as for all I know there could be a pay-off at the end of it currently indiscernible to humans, but for want of indisputable proof then I cannot see any reason to expose someone else to the dilemma of life, or at least I personally cannot do it, given I cannot find any ultimate meaning or justification for my own existence, at this present time at least.

This entry will attempt to articulate and develop Mr. White's suggestion.

What do we know? We do not know whether human life has an overall positive or negative value. It could have a positive value despite appearances to the contrary. For example, it could be that after our sojourn through this vale of tears, the veil of ignorance will be lifted and we will find ourselves in a realm of peace and light in which every tear is dried and the sense of things is revealed. It could be that the vale of tears is also a vale of soul-making in which some of us  'earn our wings.'  But this is an article of faith, not of knowledge. We don't know whether there are further facts, hidden from us at present, in whose light the world as we experience it here and now will come to be seen as overall good.

What we do know is that the problem of the value of human existence is a genuine problem and thus one that needs solving.  It needs solving presumably because it is not merely a theoretical problem in axiology but a problem with implications for practical ethics.  In particular: Is procreation morally permissible or not?

But does it follow from what we know that anti-natalism is the prudential course?  Karl answers in the affirmative.  I don't know whether Karl is an extreme or a moderate anti-natalist, but I don't think it matters for the present discussion. 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) from which axiological thesis there follows the deontic conclusion that "all procreation is wrong." (12)  A moderate anti-natalist could hold that most procreation is wrong.

One assumption that Karl seems to be making is that, absent any redemption 'from above,' the value of life for most humans is on balance negative.  This assumption I find very plausible.  But note that it rests on a still deeper assumption, namely, that the value of life can be objectively assessed or evaluated.  This assumption is not obviously correct, but it too is plausible.  Here, then, is the argument. It is a kind of 'moral safety' argument. To be on the morally safe side, we ought not procreate.

Argument for Prudential Anti-Natalism

1) There is an objective 'fact of the matter' as to whether or not human life is on balance of positive or negative value.

2) Absent any redemption 'from above,' the value of life for most humans is on balance negative, that is, the harms of existence outweigh the benefits of existence.

3) We do not know that the value of life for most humans is not on balance negative, i.e., that the harms of existence are compensated by the benefits of existence.

4) We do know that bringing children into the world will expose them to physical, mental, and spiritual suffering, and that all of those so exposed will also actually suffer the harms of existence.

5) It is morally wrong to subject people to harms when it is not known that the harms will be compensated by a greater good.

6) To have children is to subject them to such harms. Therefore:

7) It is morally wrong to procreate.

Now you have heard me say that there are no compelling arguments in philosophy, and this is certainly no exception.  I'll mention two possible lines of rebuttal.

a) Reject premise (1) along Nietzschean lines as explained in my most recent Nietzsche post.  It might be urged that any negative judgment on the value of life merely reflects the lack of vitality of the one rendering the judgment.  No healthy specimen takes suffering as an argument against against living and procreating!  I do not endorse this view, but I feel its pull. Related: Nietzsche and National Socialism.

b) Reject (3). There are those who, standing fast in their faith, would claim to know by a sort of cognitio fidei that children and life itself are divine gifts, and that in the end all the horrors and injustices of this life will be made good. 

Salvation and the Value of Life

 Patrick Toner comments:

. . . as I'm reading your post on Nietzsche, you make a mistaken claim about salvation's implications: namely, that "If we need salvation from our predicament in this life, then human life, taken on its own terms, and without appeals to hinterworlds, is of negative value."  

Professor Toner's criticism offers me a welcome opportunity to develop further some of my thoughts on this topic.

1) The logically first question is whether human life is a predicament. I say it is. A predicament is not just any old situation or condition or state but one that is deeply unsatisfactory, extrication from which is both needed and difficult to attain. There are of course predicaments in life.  For example, you are hiking in a slot canyon with sheer walls when it begins to rain.  You are in a dangerous mundane predicament. But my claim, as you would expect, is philosophical: human life as such is a predicament. I take that to be a datum, a given, a starting point. If you don't experience human life as a predicament, your life and that of others, then what I have to say on this topic won't mean anything to you.

2) Now if human life is a predicament as I have defined the term, then it follows straightaway that some sort of extrication, solution, rescue, or relief is needed, whether or not it can be had.  That is, someone in a predicament needs to be saved from it. He needs salvation.  Considerations anent salvation are called soteriological. Soteriology, as I use the term, is the general theory of salvation in some appropriately spiritual or religious or mystical sense. Our canyon hiker may end up needing to be physically saved.  But the salvation under discussion here, though it may involve some sort of physical transformation, as in bodily resurrection, is very different from being saved from drowning. 

3) Now distinguish three questions that any soteriology worth its salt would have to answer: What is saved? From what is it saved? For/to what is it saved? A schematic Roman Catholic answer would be that the soul is saved from venial and mortal sin and the just punishment for such sin (purgatory and hell) so that it may live for all eternity in the presence of God.  Toner quotes the Catholic Encylopedia:  "As sin is the greatest evil, being the root and source of all evil, Sacred Scripture uses the word 'salvation' mainly in the sense of liberation of the human race or of individual man from sin and its consequences."

4) On a Roman Catholic soteriology, then, sin is what makes our human predicament deeply unsatisfactory, and such that we both need relief, but will have a hard time attaining it.  (I should add that on Roman Catholicism, salvation cannot be attained by our own efforts: grace is also needed.) Sin explains why our condition is deeply unsatisfactory.  But of course other explanations are possible. Please note that unsatisfactoriness is the datum; sin is the explanation of the datum.

For Buddhists it is suffering that makes our predicament deeply unsatisfactory.  Buddhist soteriology is accordingly very different from Christian soteriology.  For Buddhism it is not the soul that is saved since there is no soul (doctrine of anatta), and it is not saved from sin since sin is an offense against God and there is no God (anatta again). And of course the salvific state is not the visio beata  as on Thomist Catholicism, but nibbana/nirvana. 

And of course Nietzsche's aesthetic soteriology is different from both of these.  For more on that I refer you to Giles Fraser.

5) I do not understand why Toner balks at my claim quoted above, namely, that "If we need salvation from our predicament in this life, then human life, taken on its own terms, and without appeals to hinterworlds, is of negative value." This strikes me as obviously true. If this life were wholly satisfactory, we would not seek salvation from it.  It is precisely because it is of negative value that we seek salvation in the various ways humans have sought salvation by the practice of austerites, sacrifice, good works, prayer, meditation, and so on.  It is precisely the realization that this life is marked by sickness, old age, terrible physical and mental infirmity and suffering, greed, delusion, ignorance, war, folly, torture, death . . . that sets us on the Quest for nirvana, moksha, eternal life. What drives monks to their monasteries and nuns to their nunneries is the realization that ultimately this life has nothing to offer that could truly satisfy us.

Why does Toner fail to understand my simple point?  It is because he accepts Roman Catholicism in toto and accordingly he takes the Roman Catholic soteriology to be the last, and perhaps only, word.  On this view, this world as we experience it in this life, though fallen, is a divine creation. As the product of an all-good God, it is itself good. This is why he doesn't like my talk of this life as of negative value.  He ignored my qualification: "taken on its own terms, and without appeals to hinterworlds."

That is: taken apart from its interpretation in the light of an antecedently accepted worldview such as Roman Catholicism.  An appeal to a hinterworld -- Hinterwelt is a term Nietzsche uses -- is an appeal to a world behind the phenomenal scenes, a true world in whose light the horrors of this world are redeemed.   Absent that appeal, this world is obviously of negative value.  

I am sure Patrick is capable of understanding my point since he  himself invokes the classic Catholic phrase "vale of tears." It is because we experience this world as a vale of tears  that we seek salvation from it.  Obviously, to see it as a vale of tears is to see it negatively.

6) As for Nietzsche, he was indeed a homo religiosus who experienced our way through this life as a via dolorosa. The horror of existence tormented him and he sought a solution. What my post exposed was the tension between Nietzsche's negative assessment of life, which motivates his ill-starred attempts at salvation, and his doctrine that life, as the standard of all evaluation, cannot be objectively evaluated.

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Baptism

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

Giles Fraser in his provocative Redeeming Nietzsche: On the Piety of Unbelief (Routledge 2002) maintains that "Nietzsche is obsessed with the question of human salvation" and that his work is "primarily soteriology." (p. 2)  I don't disagree with this assessment, but there is a tension in Nietzsche that ought to be pointed out, one that Fraser, from what I have read of his book, does not address.  

If we need salvation from our predicament in this life, then human life, taken on its own terms, and without appeals to hinterworlds, is of negative value. But how can life be of negative value if, as Nietzsche maintains, the value of life is inestimable?  This is the problem. Let us now delve into it.

1) Talk of salvation presupposes, first,  that there is some general state or condition, one in which we all find ourselves, from which we need salvation, and second, that this general condition is profoundly unsatisfactory.  In The Birth of Tragedy, section 3, Nietzsche invokes "the wise Silenus, the companion of Dionysus" who, when asked by King Midas about that which is most desirable for man, replied that the best of all is utterly beyond human reach: not to be born.  The second best, if one has had the misfortune of being born, is to die soon.

Now it seems clear that some such negative assessment of life, or of human life, is a precondition of any quest for salvation, no matter what form it might take, whether Buddhist, Stoic, Christian, whatever.  The negative judgment on life as a whole need not be as harsh as the Silenian one, but without some negative judgment or other as to the value of life the question of salvation  makes no sense.  To take the question seriously one need not believe that salvation to some positive state is possible; but one has to believe that the general state of humanity (or of all sentient beings) is deeply unsatisfactory, to use a somewhat mild term. 

2) But here's the rub.  Nietzsche maintains that the value of life is inestimable.  As he puts it in Twilight of the Idols ("The Problem of Socrates," sec. 2) : der Wert des Lebens nicht abgeschaetzt werden kann.  His point is that objective judgments about the value of life are impossible.  Such judgments can never be true; they count only as symptoms.  Saying nothing about life itself, they merely betray the health or decadence of those who make the judgments.  Buddha, Socrates, and all those belonging to the consensus sapientium who purport to say something objective about this life when they pronounce a negative judgment upon it, as Buddha does in the First Noble Truth (sarvam dukkham: all is suffering) merely betray their own physiological decline.  A negative judgment shows a lack of vitality, a deficiency of will power and a privation of the  will to power, which is what everything is at bottom.  There is no fact of the matter as to the value or disvalue of life itself.  There is only ascending and descending life with the value judgments being no more than symptoms either of life ascending or life descending.  Thus spoke Nietzsche.

3) The tension, then, is between the following two Nietzschean commitments: (a) Man needs salvation from his  predicament in this life; (b) The value of life cannot be objectively assessed or evaluated.  The claims cannot both be true.  The need for salvation implies that our predicament in this life is of negative value, when this cannot be the case if there is no fact of the matter concerning the value of life. 

4) Finding contradictions in Nietzsche is not very difficult, and one could even argue that the conflicting trends of his thought show its richness and its proximity to the bloody bone of the predicament in which we find ourselves; my present point, however,  is that Fraser's essentially correct claim that Nietzsche's work is "primarily soteriology" needs to be qualified by his fundamental thesis  about the inestimability of life's value, which thesis  renders soteriology impossible.

Is the value of human life objectively inestimable?

5) Can the value of life be objectively evaluated?  Does it make sense to maintain that for all of us it would have been better never to have been born? Or the opposite? Schopenhauer claims that "Human Life must be some sort of mistake." ("The Vanity of Existence" in The Will to Live, ed. R. Taylor, Frederick Unger, 1975, p. 232.) Is there a fact of the matter here? Or is Nietzsche right at Will to Power #675 where he speaks of the "absurdity of this posture of judging existence . . . It is symptomatic." Symptomatic of what? Of decay, decline, world-weariness.

Does the project of judging human life with an eye to establishing that it either is or is not worth living make sense? Is there a standard apart from life in the light of which the value of life can be assessed?  Or is life itself the standard? A most vexing series of questions.

The questions are logically prior to questions about the morality of procreation. David Benatar has famously argued for anti-natalism according to which it would be better if there were no more humans, and that therefore all procreation ought to be opposed as morally wrong, the deontic claim following from the axiological one. (David Benatar and David Wasserman, Debating Procreation, Oxford UP, 2015, pp. 12-13)

This is one tough nut to crack, and I am not sure my 'nutcracker' is up to the job. But here we go.

One relevant fact is that life is always an individual life, mine or yours or his or hers.  Heidegger spoke of the Jemeinigkeit des Daseins; I will speak of the Jemeinigkeit des Lebens.  Life has the property of 'mineness.' There is no living in general; it is always a particular affair, from a particular perspective, in a particular set of circumstances.  Lived life is always mine or yours, etc. What's more, every individual life is stretched on the rack of time:  one does not live one's individual life all at once but bit by bit.  If there is a problem about how any given individual life can judge the value of life in general, then there will also be a problem about how any phase of an individual's life can judge the value of that individual's life as a whole.

A second relevant fact, related to but distinct from the first, is that he who evaluates life is party to it. An interested party. The judger is not a mere spectator of his life, from the outside, as if it were someone else's, but a liver of it, an enactor, an actualizer of it. So it is not just that lived life is always a particular life, but also that a particular lived life is not an object of disinterested observation but a living in which the observing and evaluating are inseparable from the living.

Life judges life and Nietzsche's thought is that negative judgments are negative verdicts on the quality of the life that is judging. There is no  standard apart from life, and indeed apart from the life of the individual, by which the value of life could be measured.  No standard apart from life does not imply no standard: individual life is the standard.  The value of life's being objectively inestimable therefore does not imply that its value is merely subjective.  The implication seems to be that the individual life is an absolute standard of value in which subjective and objective coalesce.

6) "But aren't there certain general considerations that show that no life is worth living or that no life is worth very much?"  And what would those be? 

a) Well, there is the fact of impermanence or transience.  In a letter to Franz Overbeck, Nietzsche himself complains, "I am grieved by the transitoriness of things."  I feel your pain, Fritz.  Doesn't universal impermanence show that nothing in this life is worth much?  How important can anything be if it is here today and gone tomorrow?  How can anyone find value in his doings and strivings if he faces up to the universality of impermanence?  Does not the certainty of death mock the seriousness of our passions and plans?  (Arguably, most do not honestly confront impermanence but vainly imagine that everything will remain hunky-dory indefinitely.  They live in illusion until driven out of it by some such calamity as the sudden death of a loved one.) 

But on the other hand, how can impermanence be taken to be an argument against worth and importance if there is no possibility of permanence?  As Nietzsche says in Twilight, if there is no real world, if there is no world of Platonic stasis, then there is no merely apparent world either.  Is it an argument against this life that it fails to meet an impossible standard?  And is not the postulation of such a world a mere reflex of weakness and world-weariness?  Weltschmerz become creative conjures up spooks who preside over the denigration of the only world there is. 

b) And then there is the fact of misery and affliction.  (Simone Weil is one of the best writers on affliction, malheur.)  Don't we all suffer, and doesn't this universal fact show that Silenus was right after all:  better never to have been born, with second best being an early death?  But again, and taking the side of Nietzsche, is it not the miserable who find life miserable, the afflicted who find it afflicting?  The strong do not whine about pain and suffering; they take them as goads to richer and fuller living.  Or is this just Nietzschean romanticism, a failure to fully face the true horror of life?

These questions are not easy to answer!  Indeed, the very posing of them is a difficult and ticklish matter.

In the end, Nietzsche seems torn. He loves life and wants to affirm it on its own terms. And yet he seeks an ersatz salvation in the Eternal Recurrence of the Same. "For all joy wants eternity, wants deep, deep eternity."

Seriousness as Camouflage of Nullity

Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind, Harper, 1955, p. 61, #93:

The fact of death and nothingness at the end is a certitude unsurpassed by any absolute truth ever discovered.  Yet knowing this, people can be deadly serious about their prospects, grievances, duties and trespassings.  The only explanation which suggests itself is that seriousness is a means of camouflage:  we conceal the triviality and nullity of our lives by taking things seriously.  No opiate and no pleasure chase can so effectively mask the terrible truth about man’s life as does seriousness.

Summary

It is certain that we become nothing at death. We all know this. Yet we take life with utmost seriousness. We are aggrieved at the wrongs that have been done to us, and guilty at the wrongs we have done. We care deeply about our future, our legacy, and many other things.

What explains our intense seriousness and deep concern given (i) the known fact that death is annihilation of the person and (ii) the fact that this unavoidable annihilation renders our lives insignificant and not an appropriate object of seriousness?

There is only one explanation. The truth (the conjunction of (i) and (ii)) is terrible and we are loathe to face it. So we hide the triviality and nullity of our lives behind a cloak of seriousness. We deceive ourselves. What we know deep down we will not admit into the full light of consciousness.  

Evaluation

There is an element of bluster in Hoffer's argument.  It is not certainly known that death is annihilation, although it is reasonably conjectured. But even if death were known to spell the end of the person, why should this render our lives insignificant? One could argue, contra Hoffer, that our lives are significant in the only way they could be significant, namely, in the first-personal, situated, and perspectival way, and that there is no call to view our lives sub specie aeternitatis.  It might be urged that the appearance of nullity and insignificance is merely an artifact of viewing our lives from outside.  

So one rejoinder to Hoffer would be: yes, death is annihilation, but no, this fact does not render life insignificant. Therefore, there is no tension among:

1) Death is annihilation of the person.

2) Annihilation implies nullity and insignificance.

3) People are serious about their lives.

We don't have to explain why (3) is true given (1) and (2) since (2) is not true.

A second type of rejoinder would be that we don't need to explain why (3) is true given (1) and (2) because (1) is not known to be true.  This is the line I take. I would argue as follows

A. We take our lives seriously.

B. That we take them seriously is prima facie evidence that they are appropriately and truly so taken.

C. Our lives would not be serious if death were annihilation. Therefore:

D. Death is not annihilation.

This argument is obviously not rationally compelling, but it suffices to neutralize Hoffer's argument. The argument is not compelling because once could reasonably reject both (B) and (C).  Here is Hoffer's argument:

A. We take our lives seriously.

C. Our lives would not be serious if death were annihilation.

~D. Death is annihilation. Therefore:

~B. That we take our lives seriously is not evidence of their seriousness, but a means of hiding from ourselves the terrible truth.

Hoffer and I agree about (C).  Our difference is as follows. I am now and always have been deeply convinced that something is at stake in this life, that it matters deeply how we live and comport ourselves, and that it matters far beyond the petty bounds of the individual's spatiotemporal existence. Can I prove it? No. Can anyone prove the opposite? No.

Hoffer, on the other hand, is deeply convinced that in the end our lives signify nothing despite all the sound and fury.  In the end death consigns to meaninglessness a life that is indeed played out entirely within its paltry spatiotemporal limits.  In the end, our care comes to naught and seriousness is but camoflage of our nullity.

I can't budge the old steveodore and he can't budge me.  Belief butts up against belief. There's no knowledge hereabouts.

So once again I say: In the last analysis you must decide what to believe and how to live.  Life is a venture and and adventure wherein doxastic risks must be taken. Here as elsewhere one sits as many risks as he runs. 

Natural Normativity: More Foot Notes

I am trying to come to grips with Philippa Foot's  Natural Goodness (Oxford UP, 2001).

For Foot, norms are ingredient in nature herself; they are not projected by us or expressive of our psychological attitudes.  They are ingredient not in all of nature, but in all of living nature.  Living things bear within themselves norms that ground the correctness of our evaluations.  Evaluation occurs at "the intersection of two types of propositions: on the one hand, Aristotelian categoricals (life form descriptions relating to the species), and on the other, propositions about particular individuals that are the subject of evaluation." (33)

Foot bravely resists the fact-value dichotomy.  (You could say she will not stand for it.)  Values and norms are neither ideal or abstract objects in a Platonic realm apart, as Continental axiologists such as Max Scheler and Nicolai Hartmann maintained, nor are they psychological projections.  They are intrinsically ingredient in natural facts.  How does the resistance go?  We start with an Aristotelian categorical such as 'The deer is an animal whose form of defense is flight.'  The sentence is "about a species at a given historical time . . . ." (29) The individual as a member of its species is intrinsically or naturally good if it is able to serve its species by maintaining itself in existence and reproducing.

I now note something not mentioned by Foot but which I think is true.  An individual organism does not reproduce itself; it produces (usually in conjunction with an opposite sexed partner) an organism distinct  from itself, the offspring  Thus an individual's 'reproduction' is quite unlike an individual's self-maintenance.  It is the species that reproduces itself, strictly speaking, not the individual. A biological individual needs ancestors but it doesn't need descendants.  The species needs descendants. Otherwise it becomes extinct.  

I mention this to underscore the fact that Foot evaluates individuals and their parts, traits and actions in the light of the species to which the individual belongs.  The goodness of a living thing "depends directly on the relation of an individual to the 'life form' of its species." (27) This is said to hold for all living things including human animals.  It would seem to follow that human individuals have no ultimate intrinsic value or goodness as individuals: their value and goodness is relative to the contribution they make to the health and preservation of the species.  Perhaps we could say that for Foot man is a species-being in that his existence and flourishing are necessarily tied to his being a specimen of a species.  (It would make an interesting post to explore how this relates, if it does, to the Marxian notion of Gattungswesen.)

For example, suppose a deer is born with deformed limbs that prevent its engaging in swift flight from predators. This fact about it makes it an intrinsically or naturally bad deer.  For such a deer will not be able to serve its species by preserving itself in existence until it can reproduce.  The evaluation of an individual deer is conducted solely in the light of its relation to its species.  It is not evaluated as an individual in its own right.  Of course, I am not suggesting that deer be evaluated as individuals in their own right with an intrinsic moral worth that would make it wrong to treat them as means to our ends as opposed to treating them as ends in themselves.  What I am doing is preparing to resist Foot's claim that human being can be evaluated in the same way that plants and non-human animals are evaluated.

Or consider the roots of an oak tree. (46)  What makes them good roots?  In virtue of what do they have this evaluative/normative property?  They are good because they are robust, not stunted; they go deep and wide in search of water and nutrients; they do not remain near the surface or near the tree.  They are good because they are healthy.  They are healthy because they preserve the oak in existence so that it can contribute to the propagation of the species.  Bad roots, then, are defective roots.

So  evaluative properties are 'rooted in' -- pun intended! -- factual, empirically discernible,  characteristics of living things.  (The empirical detectability of normative properties makes Foot a cognitivist in meta-ethics.)  The vitality of the roots and their goodness are one in reality.  We can prise apart the factual from the evaluative mentally, but in reality there is no  distinction.  Foot does not say this in so many words, but surely this is what her position implies.  Somehow, the factual and the normative are one.  No dichotomy, split, dualism -- leastways, not in reality outside the mind.  The health of the roots and their goodness are somehow the same.  This sameness, like the notion of a species, is not entirely pellucid. 

Note, however, that this monism is purchased in the coin of an extramental dualism, namely, that between species and specimen. The normative properties are 'inscribed' in the species if you will.  A three-legged cat is a defective cat, but still a cat: it is is a defective specimen of its species.  The generic generalization 'Cats are four-legged' cannot be refuted by adducing a three-legged cat.  This is because 'cat' in the Aristotelian categorical, or generic generalization, is about the species, or, as Foot also writes,  the life form of the species, which is distinct from any and all of its specimens.  The species is normative for its specimens.

In sum, the sameness or 'monism' of normative and factual properties presupposes the dualism of species and specimen.  

A Tenable View?

One problem I mentioned earlier: the notion of a species is exceedingly murky.  But at the moment something else makes me nervous.  

For Foot life is the ultimate principle of evaluation, physical life, natural life, the life of material beings in space and time, mortal life, life that inevitably loses in the battle against death.  So the goodness of a human action or disposition is "simply a fact about a given feature of a certain kind of living thing." (5)  Badness, then, is natural defect and this goes for humans too: "moral defect is a form of natural defect." (27)  It follows that a moral defect in a person is never a spiritual defect, but in every case a natural defect.  The good man is the healthy man, the well-functioning man, where moral health is just a kind of natural health.  But the health of a healthy specimen derives from its exercise of its proper function which is dictated by its species.  A healthy specimen  is one that serves its species.  A good tiger is a good predator, and woe to you if you a member of a species that is prey to such a predator.  The tiger's job is to eat you and to be a good tiger he must do his job well.  And so it seems that a good Aryan man would then be a man who serves the Aryan race by developing all his faculties so that he can most effectively secure the Lebensraum and such that he needs, not just to survive, but to flourish, and above all to procreate and propagate, and woe to you if you are a member of weaker race, a Slavic race, say, fit to be slaves of a master race.  As a member of a race incapable of exercising to the full the virtues (powers) of a characteristic member of a master race, one is then, naturally, sub-human, an Untermensch.  A Mensch, to be sure, but a defective Mensch, and because naturally defective, or at least naturally inferior, then naturally bad.

This appears to be a consequence of taking life to the the ultimate principle of evaluation.  

At this point the fans of Foot are beginning to scream in protest.  But my point here is not to smear Foot, but to explore her kind of meta-ethical naturalism.  Actually, I am just trying to understand it.  But to understand a position you have to understand what it entails. There is philosophy-as-worldview and philosophy-as-inquiry.  This is the latter.  My intent is not polemical.

Foot's naturalism seems to imply a sort of anti-individualism and anti-personalism.  Foot views the individual human being as an organism in nature, objectivistically, biologically, from an external, third-person point of view.  She sees a man, not as a person, a subject, but as a specimen of a species, an instance of a type, whose value it tied necessarily to fulfilling the demands of the type. She also seems to be suggesting that one's fulfillment as a human being necessarily involves living in and through and for the species, like a good Gattungswesen.  

So even if a position like Foot's has the resources to prevent a slide into eugenics, or into the sort of racism that would justify slavery and the exploitation of the naturally inferior, there is still the troubling anti-personalism of it.  

How then could a monk's choice of celibacy for himself be a morally good choice?  Presumably only if it contributes to the flourishing of the human species.  But suppose our monk is not a scientist, or any other benefactor of humanity, but a hermit wholly devoted to seeking union with God.  Could Foot's framework accommodate the goodness of such a life choice?  It is not clear to me how.  It would seem that the choice to become a celibate monk or nun who lives solely for union with God would have to be evaluated on a Footian meta-ethics as morally bad, as a defective life choice.  The implication would seem to be that such a person has thrown his life away.

Now of course that would be the case if there is no God.  But suppose that God and the soul are real.  Could a Footian stance accommodate the moral choiceworthiness of the eremitic monk's choice on that assumption?  It is not clear to me how. 

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Will Science Put Religion Out of Business? Against the Folly of Transhumanism

A correspondent writes:

Here's how I think science will eventually put religion out of business. Soon medical science is going to be able to offer serious life extension, not pie-in-the-sky soul survival or re-incarnation, but real life extension with possible rejuvenation. When science can offer and DELIVER what religion can only promise, religion is done.

1.  Religion is in the transcendence business.  The type of transcendence offered depends on the particular religion.  The highly sophisticated form of Christianity expounded by Thomas Aquinas offers the visio beata, the Beatific Vision.  In the BV -- you will forgive the abbreviation -- the soul does not lose its identity.  It maintains its identity, though in a transformed mode, while participating in the divine life.  Hinduism and Buddhism offer even more rarefied forms of transcendence in which the individual self is either absorbed into the eternal Atman/Brahman, thereby losing its individual identity, or extinguished altogether  by entry into Nirvana.  And there are cruder forms of transcendence, in popular forms of Christianity, in Islam, and in other faiths, in which the individual continues to exist after death  but with little or no transformation to enjoy delights that are commensurable with the ones enjoyed here below.  The crudest form, no doubt, is the popular Islamic notion of paradise as an endless sporting with 72 black-eyed virgins.  So on the one end of the spectrum: transcendence as something difficult to distinguish from utter extinction; on the other end, immortality mit Haut und Haar (to borrow a delightful phrase from Schopenhauer), "with skin and hair" in a realm of sensuous delights but without the usual negatives such as heartburn and erectile dysfunction. 

I think we can safely say that a religion that offers no form of transcendence, whether Here or Hereafter, is no religion at all.  Religion, then, is in the business of offering transcendence.

2.  I agree with my correspondent that if science can provide what religion promises, then science will put religion out  of business.  But as my crude little sketch above shows, different religions promise different things.  Now the crudest form of transcendence is physical immortality, immortality "with skin and hair."  Is it reasonable to hope that future science will give rise to a technology that will make us, or some of us, physically immortal, where 'physical' is understood as we understand it in the here and now?  I don't think so.  That would violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics according to which the entropy of an irreversible process in an isolated system increases leading in the case of the universe (which is both isolated and irreversible) to the heat death of the universe and the end of all life.  Granted, that is way off in the future.  But that is irrelevant if the claim is that physical immortality is possible by purely physical means.  And if that is not the claim, then the use of the phrase 'physical immortality' is out of place.  In a serious discussion like this word games are strictly verboten.

3.  Physical immortality is nomologically impossible, impossible given the laws of nature.  Of course, a certain amount of life extension has been achieved and it is reasonable to expect that more will be achieved. So suppose the average life expectancy of people like us gets cranked up to 130 years.  To underscore the obvious, to live to 130 is not to live forever. Suppose you have made it to 130 and are now on your death bed.  If you have any spiritual depth at all, your lament is likely to be similar to that of Jacob's: "The length of my pilgrimage  has been one hundred and thirty years; short and wretched has been my life, nor does it compare with the years my fathers lived during their pilgrimage." (Genesis 47:9) 

The important point here is that once a period of time is over, it makes no difference how long it has lasted.  It is over and done with and accessible only in the flickering and dim light of intermittent and fallible memory.  The past 'telescopes' and 'scrunches up,' the years melt into one another; the past cannot be relived.  What was distinctly lived is now all a blur.  And now death looms before you.  What does it matter that you lived 130 or 260 years? You are going to die all the same, and be forgotten, and all your works with you. After a while it will be as if you never existed.

The problem is not that our lives are short; the problem is that we are in time at all.  No matter how long a life extends it is still a life in time, a life in which the past is no longer, the future not yet, and  the present a passing away.  This problem, the problem of the transitoriness of life, cannot be solved by life extension even if, per impossibile, physical immortality were possible.  This problem of the transitoriness and vanity of life is one that religion addresses.

So my first conclusion is this.  Even if we take religion in its crudest form, as promising physical immortality, "with skin and hair," science cannot put such a crude religion out of business.  For, first of all, physical immortality is physically impossible, and second, mere life extension, even unto the age of a Methuselah, does not solve the problem of the transitoriness of life.

4.  But I have just begun to scratch the surface of the absurdities of transhumanism. No higher religion is about providing natural goodies  by supernatural means, goodies  that cannot be had by natural means.   Talk of pie-in-the-sky is but a cartoonish misrepresentation by those materialists who can only think in material terms and only believe in what they can hold in their hands. A religion such as Christianity promises a way out of the unsatisfactory predicament we find ourselves in in this life.  What makes our situation unsatisfactory is not merely our physical and mental weakness and the shortness of our lives.  It is primarily our moral defects that make our lives in this world miserable.  We lie and slander, steal and cheat, rape and murder.  We are ungrateful for what we have and filled with inordinate desire for what we don't have and wouldn't satisfy us even if we had it.  We are avaricious, gluttonous, proud, boastful and self-deceived.  It is not just that our wills are weak; our wills are perverse.  It is not just that are hearts are cold; our hearts are foul.  You say none of this applies to you?  Very well, you will end up the victim of those to whom these predicates do apply. And then your misery will be, not the misery of the evil-doer, but the misery of the victim and the slave.  You may find yourself forlorn and forsaken in a concentration camp. Suffering you can bear, but not meaningless suffering, not injustice and absurdity.

Whether or not the higher religions can deliver what they promise, what they promise first and foremost is deliverance from ignorance and delusion, salvation from meaninglessness and moral evil.  So my correspondent couldn't be more wrong.  No physical technology can do what religion tries to do.  Suppose a technology is developed that actually reverses the processes of aging and keeps us all alive indefinitely.  This is pure fantasy, of course, given the manifold contingencies of the world (nuclear and biological warfare, terrorism, natural disasters, etc.); but just suppose.  Our spiritual and moral predicament would remain as deeply fouled-up as it has always been and religion would remain in business.

5.  If, like my correspondent, you accept naturalism and scientism, then you ought to face what you take to be reality, namely, that we are all just clever animals slated to perish utterly in a few years, and not seek transcendence where it cannot be found.  Accept no substitutes!  Transhumanism is an ersatz religion.

It could be like this.  All religions are false; none can deliver what they promise.  Naturalism is true: reality is exhausted by the space-time system.  You are not unreasonable if you believe this.  But I say you are unreasonable if you think that technologies derived from the sciences of nature can deliver what religions have promised.

As long as there are human beings there will be religion.  The only way I can imagine religion withering away is if humanity allows itself to be gradually replaced by soulless robots.  But in that case it will not be that the promises of religion are fulfilled by science; it would be that no one would be around having religious needs.

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Depoliticize and Humanize

Reading Notebooks 1951-1959 of Albert Camus, I cannot help but love and sympathize with this sensitive, self-doubting, and tortured soul.

Stages of healing.

Letting volition sleep. Enough of 'you must.'

Completely depoliticize the mind in order to humanize it.

Write the claustrophobic -- and comedies.

Deal with death, which is to say, accept it.

Accept making a spectacle of yourself.  I will not die of this anguish.  If I died from it, the end.  Otherwise, at worst, shortsighted behavior.  It suffices to accept others' judgment.  Humility and acceptance: purely medical remedies of anguish. (p. 203)

Like his hero Nietzsche, Camus had the throbbing heart of the homo religiosus but the bladed intellect of the skeptic: he could not bring himself to believe. Trust in the ultimate sense of things was impossible for this argonaut of the Absurd, as was hope.  Thus humility and acceptance could only be for him "purely medical remedies."  

And how could he completely depoliticize his mind when the only world for him was this miserably political one? If this is all there is, then all of one's hopes and dreams and aspirations for peace and justice have to be trained upon it and its future.  There you have the futile delusion of the 'progressive.'  Rejecting God, he puts his faith in Man, when it ought to be evident that Man does not exist, only men, at each others' throats, full of ignorance and corruption, incapable of redeeming themselves.

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Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959, tr. Ryan Bloom, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2010, p. 202:

Algerians.  They live in the richness and warmth of friendship and family.  The body as the center, and its virtues -- and its [sic] profound sadness as soon as it declines -- life without a view other than the immediate one, than the physical circle.  Proud of their virility, of their capacity for eating and drinking, of their strength and their courage.  Vulnerable.

The long views of philosophy are not to everyone's taste.  If not bored, many are depressed by the contemplation of death and pain, God and the soul, the meaning or meaninglessness of our lives.  They prefer not to think of such things and consider it best to take short views.  If as Thomas Nagel maintains, the contemplation sub specie aeternitatis of one's daily doings drains them of seriousness, one is under no obligation to take the view from nowhere.

Is it best to take short views? To live in immediacy, immersed in the quotidian and not questioning it?  

Sometimes it is. When the going gets tough, it is best to pull in one’s horns, hunker down, and just try to get through the next week, the next day, the next hour. One can always meet the challenge of the next hour. Be here now and deal with what is on your plate at the moment. Most likely you will find a way forward.

But, speaking for myself, a life without long views would not be worth living. I thrill at the passage in Plato’s Republic, Book Six (486a), where the philosopher is described as a "spectator of all time and existence." And then there is this beautiful formulation by  William James:

The absolute things, the last things, the overlapping things, are the truly philosophic concerns; all superior minds feel seriously about them, and the mind with the shortest views is simply the mind of the more shallow man. (Pragmatism, Harvard UP, 1975, p. 56)

I wrote above, "speaking for myself." The expression was not used redundantly inasmuch as it conveys that my philosopher’s preference for the long view is not one that I would want to or try to urge on anyone else. In my experience, one cannot argue with another man’s sensibility. And much of life comes down to precisely that -- sensibility. If people share a sensibility, then argument is useful for its articulation and refinement. But I am none too sanguine about the possibility of arguing someone into, or out of, a sensibility.

How argue the atheist out of his abiding sense that the universe is godless, or the radical out of his conviction of human perfectibility?  How argue me out of my deep conviction that the pursuit of name and fame, land and loot, is base and pointless?

If the passages I cited from Plato and James leave you cold, how could I change your mind? If you sneer at my being thrilled, what then? Argument comes too late. Or if you prefer, sensibility comes too early.

One might also speak of a person’s sense of life, view of what is important, or ‘feel for the real.’ James’ phrase, "feel seriously," is apt. To the superior mind, ultimate questions "feel real," whereas to the shallow mind they appear pointless, unimportant, silly. It is equally true that the superior mind is made such by its wrestling with these questions.

Maximae res, cum parvis quaeruntur, magnos eos solent efficere.

Matters of the greatest importance, when they are investigated by little men, tend to make those men great. (Augustine,Contra Academicos 1. 2. 6.) 

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The Sense That Nothing Matters

Many are tempted by the thought that nothing ultimately matters, and in some this thought becomes an oppressive mood that paralyzes and renders life unlivable.  Leo Tolstoy's "My Confession" is perhaps the best expression of this dark and oppressive nihilism.  But the sense that nothing matters contains an insight which is as it were the silver lining of the dark cloud of nihilism.

The insight is that nothing finite is truly satisfactory, worthy of our ultimate concern, or finally real. It is an insight that serves as prophylaxis against the smug self-satisfaction of the worldling and his idolatry of the transient.

The nihilist is closer to God than he thinks, closer than the worldling, and closer than those for whom religion is a palliative and a convenience.

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The View from Mount Zapffe: The Absurdity of 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 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.  Antinatalism 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 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.  They 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 (2/25):  Karl White refers us to some translations of Zapffe.

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On 'Making It'

One reason to try to 'make it' is to come to appreciate, by succeeding, that worldly success cannot  be a final goal of legitimate human striving. 'Making it' frees one psychologically and allows one to turn one's attention to worthier matters.  He who fails is dogged by a sense of failure whereas he who succeeds is in a position to appreciate the ultimate insignificance of both success and failure, not that most of the successful ever do.  Their success traps them.  Hence the sad spectacle of the old coot, a good flight of stairs away from a major coronary event, scheming and angling for more loot and land when in the end a man needs only -- six feet.

The Pig, the Fool, and Socrates

A reader opines:

I like animals because I think they're a higher form of life. They have no pretenses about what they are; a dog can achieve levels of serenity and fulfillment of which I cannot conceive by merely being a dog and doing dog things. Myself, on the other hand, I could be the next Einstein with the face of James Dean and still very likely be miserable all my life.

I like animals too, but not because they are a higher form of life.  They are lower forms of life.  The ascription of pretentiousness to a cat or dog is of course absurd, but equally so is the ascription of serenity and fulfillment to them if these words carry the meaning that we attach to them. It is because man is a spiritual being that he can pretend and fake and dissemble and posture and blow up his ego like a balloon to blot out the sun.  And it is because man is a spiritual being that he can know serenity, fulfillment, and in rare cases the peace that surpasseth all understanding.  Man has not only the power of thought but also the mystical power to transcend thought.  All of this is beyond the animal.  If you disagree, then I will ask you to produce the mathematical and metaphysical and mystical treatises of the dolphins and the apes. Who among them is a Paul Erdös or a Plato or a Juan de la Cruz?  As Heidegger says somewhere, "An abyss yawns between man and animal."

On the other hand no animal knows misery like we do.  Barred out heights, they are also barred our depths of wretchedness and despair. 

So while I have many bones to pick with John Stuart Mill on the score of his utilitarianism and his hedonism and his psychologism in logic and his internally inconsistent attempt at distinguishing higher from lower pleasures, his is a noble soul and I agree with the sentiment expressed in this well-known passage from Utilitarianism, Chapter II:

It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied  than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they know only their own side of the question.  The other party to the comparison knows both sides.

I wonder if Mill can validate  this noble thought within his paltry hedonist scheme.  It is in any case a value judgment and I am not sure I would be able to refute someone who preferred the life of a cat or a dog or a contented cow to that of a man, half-angel, half-beast, tormented, crazed, but participant in highest bliss.   But I agree with Nietzsche that man is something to be overcome, though not along the lines he proposes. He needs perfecting.  I cannot forbear to quote his marvellous jab at the English hedonists from The Twilight of the Idols:

If we have our own why of life, we shall get along with almost any how.  Man does not strive for pleasure; only the Englishman does. ("Maxims and Arrows," #12, tr. W. Kaufmann.)

Why do We Obsess Over Ultimate Meaning?

Or if not literally obsess, care deeply?  Karl White passes on the following from one of his correspondents:

Why are we all so obsessed with infusing things with meaning anyway? Isn't this craving a mere artifact of being brought up under systems of belief that insist on the fact that life has to serve some purpose? Maybe if we hadn't been presented with such presumptions from the beginning, we wouldn't have such a hard time accepting existence?

These are reasonable questions.  Perhaps we cannot be satisfied with finite meanings and relative satisfactions and cannot accept the utter finality of death only because we have have been culturally brainwashed for centuries upon centuries into thinking that there is some Grand Purpose at the back of things that we participate in, and some Final Redemption, when there is none.  Perhaps we have been laboring under a God Delusion or a Transcendent Meaning Delusion for lo these many centuries.   But now these delusions are losing their grip.  One sort of person responds to the loss despairingly and pessimistically.  Call it the Woody Allen response.  Allen laments the absurdity of life and makes movies to distract himself and others from the dismal reality.  Another sort of person digs in his heels and frantically tries to shore up the delusions by concocting ever more subtle metaphysical arguments when he knows deep down, as Allen would insist, that it's all "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." 

The cure for both is the same: drop the delusions.  Stop measuring reality against a nonexistent standard.  To paraphrase Nietzsche,  when the supposedly Real World falls, then so does the Apparent World.  (See The Twilight of the Idols.) The erasure of the Transcendent abrogates the denigration of the Immanent.  The Immanent, now no longer immanent, is the sole reality.  Live it, love it, affirm it.  The finite suffices.  Its finitude is no argument against this life if the only alternative is an Infinity that doesn't exist.  Death is no argument against life if this is all there is.  Drop the delusion and its hinterworlds and you will neither despair nor hope.  You will learn to be true to the earth, your natural and only home.

The above considerations don't sway me. 

What explains the origin of the systems of belief whose appropriation makes us hanker after Transcendence?  Is the longing an artifact of the belief, or the belief an artifact of the longing? 

I would say that the longing explains the belief.  The belief cannot explain the longing since the belief had to first be there to explain anything, and what explains it is the longing.   From time immemorial, people have experienced a deep dissatisfaction with the here and now and with it a longing for a better, truer, higher life.  These experiences are real, though not had by everyone, and not equally by those who have them.  Outstanding individuals translated these recurrent and widely-distributed experiences of  dissatisfaction and longing into systems of belief and practice of various sorts, Buddhism being one example, with its sarvam dukkham.  These systems were developed and passed on.  They 'resonated' with people, all sorts of people, from every land, at every time.  Why?  Because they spoke to some real inchoate longing that people everywhere have.  They answer to a real need, the metaphysical need.  (Cf. Schopenhauer, "On Man's Need for Metaphysics" in WWR vol. II)  So it is not as if people were brainwashed into accepting these symbolic forms; they express and articulate real dissatisfaction with the mundane and ephemeral and real longing for lasting beatitude.

In sum: the experiences of deep dissatisfaction and deep longing are real; they come first phylogenetically, ontogenetically, temporally, logically, and epistemically.  They give rise to systems of belief and practice (and not the other way around).   Both the experiences and the beliefs are evidence of a sort for the reality of that which could remove the dissatisfaction and assuage the longing.  Of course, it takes some careful arguing to get from longing for X to the reality of X.

This leads us to the topic of Arguments from Desire, a topic to be pursued in subsequent posts.

Since I mentioned Nietzsche above, I will end with Zarathustra's Roundelay, which never fails to bring tears to my eyes.  It shows that Nietzsche, though possessing the bladed intellect of the skeptic, had the throbbing heart of a  homo religiosus.  In his own perverse way he testifies to the truth above suggested.  "All joy wants eternity, wants deep, wants deep eternity!"

Zarathustra's Rundgesang

Oh Mensch! Gib acht!

Was spricht die tiefe Mitternacht?

»Ich schlief, ich schlief—,

Aus tiefem Traum bin ich erwacht:—

Die Welt ist tief,

Und tiefer als der Tag gedacht.

Tief ist ihr Weh—,

Lust—tiefer noch als Herzeleid:

Weh spricht: Vergeh!

Doch alle Lust will Ewigkeit—,

—will tiefe, tiefe Ewigkeit!«

Walter Kaufmann trans.:

O man, take care!

What does the deep midnight declare?

"I was asleep—

From a deep dream I woke and swear:

The world is deep,

Deeper than day had been aware.

Deep is its woe;

Joy—deeper yet than agony:

Woe implores: Go!

But all joy wants eternity—

Wants deep, wants deep eternity."

 Adrian del Caro trans.:

Oh mankind, pray!

What does deep midnight have to say?

"From sleep, from sleep—

From deepest dream I made my way:—

The world is deep,

And deeper than the grasp of day.

Deep is its pain—,

Joy—deeper still than misery:

Pain says: Refrain!

Yet all joy wants eternity—

—Wants deep, wants deep eternity."

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Woody Allen, Meet Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange

To repeat some of what I wrote yesterday,

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.

Woody Allen on the Meaninglessness of Human Existence

Excerpts from an interview of Woody Allen by Robert E. Lauder (bolding added):

RL: When Ingmar Bergman died, you said even if you made a film as great as one of his, what would it matter? It doesn’t gain you salvation. So you had to ask yourself why do you continue to make films. Could you just say something about what you meant by “salvation”?

WA: Well, you know, you want some kind of relief from the agony and terror of human existence. Human existence is a brutal experience to me . . . it’s a brutal, meaningless experience—an agonizing, meaningless experience with some oases, delight, some charm and peace, but these are just small oases. Overall, it is a brutal, brutal, terrible experience, and so it’s what can you do to alleviate the agony of the human condition, the human predicament? That is what interests me the most. I continue to make the films because the problem obsesses me all the time and it’s consistently on my mind and I’m consistently trying to alleviate the problem, and I think by making films as frequently as I do I get a chance to vent the problems. There is some relief. I have said this before in a facetious way, but it is not so facetious: I am a whiner. I do get a certain amount of solace from whining. 

RL: Are you saying the humor in your films is a relief for you? Or are you sort of saying to the audience, “Here is an oasis, a couple of laughs”?

WA: I think what I’m saying is that I’m really impotent against the overwhelming bleakness of the universe and that the only thing I can do is my little gift and do it the best I can, and that is about the best I can do, which is cold comfort.

RL: In Everyone Says I Love You, the character you play gets divorced, and as he and his former wife review their relationship near the end of the film, she says, “You could always make me laugh,” and your character asks very sincerely, “Why is that important?” Do you think what you do is important?

WA: No, not so much. Whenever they ask women what they find appealing in men, a sense of humor is always one of the things they mention. Some women feel power is important, some women feel that looks are important, tenderness, intelligence…but sense of humor seems to permeate all of them. So I’m saying to that character played by Goldie Hawn, “Why is that so important?” But it is important apparently because women have said to us that that is very, very important to them. I also feel that humor, just like Fred Astaire dance numbers or these lightweight musicals, gives you a little oasis. You are in this horrible world and for an hour and a half you duck into a dark room and it’s air-conditioned and the sun is not blinding you and you leave the terror of the universe behind and you are completely transported into an escapist situation. The women are beautiful, the men are witty and heroic, nobody has terrible problems and this is a delightful escapist thing, and you leave the theatre refreshed. It’s like drinking a cool lemonade and then after a while you get worn down again and you need it again. It seems to me that making escapist films might be a better service to people than making intellectual ones and making films that deal with issues. It might be better to just make escapist comedies that don’t touch on any issues. The people just get a cool lemonade, and then they go out refreshed, they enjoy themselves, they forget how awful things are and it helps them—it strengthens them to get through the day. So I feel humor is important for those two reasons: that it is a little bit of refreshment like music, and that women have told me over the years that it is very, very important to them.

RL: At one point in Hannah and Her Sisters, your character, Mickey, is very disillusioned. He is thinking about becoming a Catholic and he sees Duck Soup. He seems to think, “Maybe in a world where there are the Marx Brothers and humor, maybe there is a God. Who knows.” And maybe Mickey can live with that. Am I interpreting this correctly?

WA: No. I think it should be interpreted to mean that there are these oases, and life is horrible, but it is not relentlessly black from wire to wire. You can sit down and hear a Mozart symphony, or you can watch the Marx Brothers, and this will give you a pleasant escape for a while. And that is about the best that you can do…. I feel that one can come up with all these rationalizations and seemingly astute observations, but I think I said it well at the end of Deconstructing Harry: we all know the same truth; our lives consist of how we choose to distort it, and that’s it. Everybody knows how awful the world is and what a terrible situation it is and each person distorts it in a certain way that enables him to get through. Some people distort it with religious things. Some people distort it with sports, with money, with love, with art, and they all have their own nonsense about what makes it meaningful, and all but nothing makes it meaningful. These things definitely serve a certain function, but in the end they all fail to give life meaning and everyone goes to his grave in a meaningless way.

RL: That brings us to the end of Crimes and Misdemeanors. Your character and an ophthalmologist named Judah are having a conversation, and Judah pretends he’s talking about a screenplay but he’s really talking about his own life. He says people do commit crimes, they get away with it, and they don’t even have guilt feelings. And your character says this is horrible, this is terrible, and then you cut to a blind rabbi dancing with his daughter at her wedding, and we hear a voiceover from a philosopher your character admires. He says something like, “There is no ultimate meaning but somehow people have found that they can cope.” The philosopher didn’t really cope; he committed suicide. When I first saw the film I thought you were offering the audience several views of life and leaving it to them to decide which is closest to the truth—Judah’s, Cliff’s, the philosopher’s, or the rabbi’s. (He’s the one who seems to be the happiest and most fulfilled character in the film, despite his blindness.) But in an interview you said that really the ophthalmologist is basically right: there is no benevolent God watching over us at all, and we embrace whatever gets us through the night. Is that right?

WA: I feel that is true—that one can commit a crime, do unspeakable things, and get away with it. There are people who commit all sorts of crimes and get away with it, and some of them are plagued with all sorts of guilt for the rest of their lives and others aren’t. They commit terrible crimes and they have wonderful lives, wonderful, happy lives, with families and children, and they have done unspeakably terrible things. There is no justice, there is no rational structure to it. That is just the way it is, and each person figures out some way to cope…. Some people cope better than others. I was with Billy Graham once, and he said that even if it turned out in the end that there is no God and the universe is empty, he would still have had a better life than me. I understand that. If you can delude yourself by believing that there is some kind of Santa Claus out there who is going to bail you out in the end, then it will help you get through. Even if you are proven wrong in the end, you would have had a better life.

RL: Seven or eight years ago the New York Times asked you to name a favorite film and you picked Shane. It seems to me that the character of Shane is a Christ figure. At one point, Chris Callaway, the guy Shane has beaten in a fistfight in the saloon, changes sides. He leaves the villains and joins Shane and the good guys. When Shane asks him why, he says something has come over him. Shane has had some mysterious impact on him. Shane does not ride off into the sunset as heroes usually do in old Westerns. He rides off into the sunrise, and as he does so the director does this strange thing: he holds a dissolve of a cross from the cemetery, and he keeps it on the screen for about five seconds. Do you remember that at all?

WA:  I do remember it. Yes, now that you bring it up, I do.

RL:  So the film seems to end with resurrection imagery.  

WA:  I didn’t see him as a martyred figure, a persecuted figure. I saw him as quite a heroic figure who does a job that needs to be done, a practical matter. I saw him as a practical secular character. In this world there are just some people who need killing and that is just the way it is. It sounds terrible, but there is no other way to get around that, and most of us are not up to doing it, incapable for moral reasons or physically not up to it. And Shane is a person who saw what had to be done and went out and did it. He had the skill to do it, and that’s the way I feel about the world: there are certain problems that can only be dealt with that way. As ugly a truth as that is, I do think it’s the truth about the world.

Comment.  I think things are actually worse than Woody Allen makes them out to be.  According to him, 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. Ordinary folk live for their children and grandchildren as if procreation has redemptive power.

But it is worse than Woody Allen makes it out to be  because we don't know that human existence is meaningless and that salvation from it is an illusion.  We suspect that this is the case and we fear that it is the case, but surely we don't know that it is the case.  And so our predicament is an uneasy and anxiety-ridden one.  Maybe it does ultimately matter how I live.  Perhaps something really is at stake in life beyond the petty, mundane, and ephemeral.  If we knew that it is all "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing," then we would enjoy a measure of peace and doxastic security.  We could rest in this knowledge and commit suicide fearlessly and with a good conscience when and if it becomes necessary or desirable.

But as things are, we are left with the anxiety of Hamlet:

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover’d country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.–Soft you now!
The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remember’d.

 

Act 3, Scene 1

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Here is the penultimate paragraph of John Lach's In Love with Life: Reflections on the Joy of Living and Why We Hate to Die (Vanderbilt UP, 1998):

When the time comes [to die], we must surround ourselves with life.  In a bustling hospital or a loving home, let everyone get on with their [sic] activities.  To die in the midst of energy is not to die at all, but to transfer one's life and hopes to those who carry on.  The continuity of our lives and our personalities makes the death of any one individual an event of little moment: the great celebration of existence goes on. (p. 123)

This is an example of one  sort of self-deception secularists fall into when they attempt to affirm the value of life.   If this is it, it is at least a serious question whether this life can be ascribed a positive value.  One doesn't have to go all the way with Schopenhauer to appreciate that this life with its manifold miseries and horrors and injustices is of dubious value.  It is certainly not obvious that "Life is good" as one sees emblazoned on the spare tire covers of SUVs in the tonier neighborhoods.

One response to the evils of the world is denial of such facts as are adduced by Schopenhauer:

The truth is, we ought to be wretched and we are so.  The chief source of the serious evils which affect men is man himself: homo homini lupus.  Whoever keeps this last fact clearly in view  beholds the world as a hell, which surpasses that of Dante in this respect, that one man must be the devil of another. (The Will to Live, p. 204)

Judging from the above passage, Lachs appears to be in denial.  Surely the following is a silly and well-nigh meaningless assurance: " To die in the midst of energy is not to die at all, but to transfer one's life and hopes to those who carry on."  So if I die in the midst of energetic people I haven't died? That is false to the point of being delusional, a flat denial of the fact of death.  It is an evasion of the fact and finality of death.  And it is nonsense to say that at death "one's life" is transferred to others.  One's life is one's individual life; on a secular understanding it ceases to exist at death.  It is nontransferrable.  As for the "celebration of existence," try explaining that to Syrian refugees or to those who at this very moment are being tortured to death.

Other secularists such as Adorno deny value in a manner most extreme to this present life, but look to the future of this life for redemption.  This too is  delusional in my judgment.  See After Auschwitz.

Secularists need to face the problem of evil.  This is not a problem for theists only.  It is a problem for anyone who affirms the value of life.   If the fact of evil is evidence (whether demonstrative or inductive) of the nonexistence of God, then it is also evidence of the nonaffirmability of this life. 

The Sense of Contingency and the Sense of Absurdity

The parallel is fascinating and worth exploring.

According to David Hume, "Whatever we conceive as existent, we can also conceive as non-existent." (Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion)  I've long believed Hume to be right about this.  I would put it this way, trading Latin for plain Anglo-Saxon: Our minds are necessarily such that, no matter what we think of as existing, we can just as easily think of as not existing.  This includes God.  Now God, to be divine, must be a necessary being, indeed a necessary concretum. (God cannot be an abstract entity.)  Therefore, even a necessary being such as God is conceivable or thinkable as nonexistent. 

Try it for yourself.  Think of God together with all his omni-attributes and then think of God as not existing.  Our atheist pals have no trouble on this score.  The nonexistence of God is thinkable without logical contradiction.* 

Note the ambiguity of 'conceivable.'  It could mean thinkable, or it could mean thinkable without (internal) logical contradiction.  Round squares are conceivable in the first sense but not in the second.  If round squares were in no sense conceivable, how could we think about them and pronounce them broadly logically impossible?  Think about it!

Now try the experiment with an abstract necessary being such as the number 7 or the proposition *7 is prime.*  Nominalists have no trouble conceiving the nonexistence of such Platonica, and surely we  who are not nominalists can understand their point of view.  In short, absolutely everything can be thought of, without logical contradiction, as not existing.

Humius vindicatus est.

I now define the sense of contingency as the sense that everything is thinkable without logical contradiction as nonexistent.  I claim that this sense is essential to the type of mind we have.  I also claim that the sense of contingency does not entail that everything is modally contingent, i.e., existent in some but not all metaphysically (broadly logically) possible worlds.  So from the mere fact that I can think the nonexistence of God without logical contradiction, it does not follow that God is a contingent being.   I further claim that we have a hard-to-resist tendency to conflate illicitly the sense of contingency (precisely as I have just defined it) with genuine modal contingency.

So, if someone argues a contingentia mundi  to God as causa prima, he can expect the knee-jerk response: what caused God?  Behind that reflexive question is the sense of contingency:  if the universe is contingent (because conceivably nonexistent) and needs a cause, then so is anything posited as first cause.  What then caused the First Cause?  If nothing caused it, the knee-jerk responder continues, then it just exists as a matter of brute fact; and if we can accept brute-factuality at the level of the First Cause, then we can accept it at the level of the universe and be done with this nonsense.  We can say, with Russell, that the universe just exists and that's all. 

My point is that it is the sense of contingency, together with the illicit conflation just mentioned, that fuels the knee-jerk response to the argument to a causa prima. 

The sense of absurdity as described by Thomas Nagel is analogous to the sense of contingency, or so I claim.  The sense that our lives are Nagel-absurd does not entail that they are objectively absurd.  And yet we are necessarily such that we cannot avoid the sense of Nagel-absurdity.  About absolutely everything we can ask: what is the purpose of it?  What is it good for?  What is the point of it?  The subjectively serious, under the aspect of eternity, viewed wth detachment from nowhere, comes to appear objectively gratuitous.  This holds for every context of meaning, no matter how wide, including the ultimate context.  Suppose the ultimate context is eternal fellowship with God.  Reflecting on it from our present perspective, viewing it from outside, we can ask what the point of it would be, just as we can ask what caused God.

The classical answer to 'What caused God?' is that God is a necessary being.  He has no external cause or explanation, but his existence is not a brute fact either.  God is self-existent or self-grounding or self-explanatory.  Nagel has trouble with this idea:  "But it's very hard to understand how there could be such a thing." (WDIAM, 99)  Why does our man have trouble?  Because there is nothing that could put a stop to our explanation-seeking 'Why?' questions.  In a sense he is right.  The structure of our finite discursive intellects makes it impossible to stop definitively, makes it impossible to have self-evident, question-squelching, positive insight into the absolute metaphysical necessity of God's existence in the way have self-evident positive insight into the impossibility of round squares or the necessity of colors being extended.   The best we can do is see  the failure of entailment from 'Everything is conceivably nonexistent' to 'Everything is modally contingent.'

Just as Nagel cannot suppress the question 'What explains God?,' he cannot suppress the question 'What is the point of God?' or 'What is the point of fulfilling God's purpose for our lives?'  Nagel cannot see how there could be something that gives point to everything else by encompassing it, but has no external point itself. He cannot see how God can be self-purposing, i.e., without external purpose but also not purposeless.  Nagel thinks that if the point of our lives is supplied by a pointless God, and a pointless God  is acceptable, then  we ought to find pointless lives acceptable.

Nagel can't see how the ultimate point could be God or eternal life with God.  "Something whose point cannot be questioned from outside because there is no outside?" (100)  Given the very structure of our embodied awareness, there is always the possibility of the 'outside view' which then collides with the situated subjective 'inside view.'  It is this unavoidable duality within finite embodied consciousness, and essential to it, that makes it impossible for Nagel to accept a self-purposing, self-significant, self-intelligible ultimate context.

So for Nagel objective meaninglessness is the last word.  For me it is not: our lives are ultimately and objectively meaningful.  But Nagel has a point: we cannot, given the present configuration of finite, discursive, embodied awareness, truly understand with positive insight God's metaphysical necessity or how there could be an ultimate context of existential meaning that is self-grounding axiologically, teleologically, and ontologically.

So I suggest that ultimate felicity and ultimate meaningfulness can be had only by a transfiguration and transformation of our 'present' type of finite, discursive consciousness with its built-in duality of the subjective and the objective.

But I can only gesture in the direction of that Transfiguration.  I cannot present it to you while we inhabit the discursive plane.  All I can do is point to the Transdiscursive, and motivate the pointing by exfoliating  the antinomies and aporiai that remain insoluble this side of the Great Divide. 

________________________

*One way to oppose this is via the Anderson-Welty argument lately examined.  If the exsistence of God is the ultimate presupposition of the laws of logic, then all reasoning, whether valid or invalid, to God or away from God or neither, and all considerations anent logical possibility, necessity, impossibility, contradiction and the like presuppose the existence of God.

A second way of opposition was tread by me in my A Paradigm Theory of Existence.

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The Absurd Again: Weak and Strong Nagelian Theses

The Absurd: Nagel, Camus, Lupu

Senses of 'Absurd' and the Difference between Nagel-Absurdity and Absolute Absurdity

Can Life be Meaningless but not Absurd?

Can Life be Meaningless but not Absurd?

Thomas Nagel suggests as much at the end of Chapter 10, "The Meaning of Life," of his little introductory text, What Does It All Mean? (Oxford UP, 1987):

If life is not real, life is not earnest, and the grave is its goal, perhaps it's ridiculous to take ourselves so seriously.  On the other hand, if we can't help taking ourselves so seriously, perhaps we just have to put up with being ridiculous.  Life may be not only meaningless, but absurd. (101)

Did you catch the allusion to Longfellow?  It is to the second stanza of "A Psalm of LIfe":

Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou are, to dust thou returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.

Now one might naturally think that life is meaningless if and only if life is absurd, that in this context 'meaningless' and 'absurd' are equivalent expressions.  The Nagel quotation, however, suggests that the equivalence fails.  While an absurd life is a meaningless life, a meaningless life needn't be absurd.

But how?  How can a life be meaningless but not absurd? 

I

Well, suppose your life (and everyone's life) is objectively meaningless, objectively without point or purpose.  That does not translate into the "philosophical sense of absurdity"  (phrase from Nagel's 1971 article) unless one takes one's life seriously.  To take one's life seriously, Nagel suggests, is to aim at more than comfort and survival.  It is to dedicate oneself to something important, "not just important to you, but important in some larger sense: important, period." (101) The problem, as we have seen from earlier discussions, is that seriousness collides with the view from nowhere.  Viewing my life from the outside tends to drain it of seriousness.  The sense of absurdity arises when "the incurable tendency to take ourselves seriously" comes into conflict with the view "from the outside." The serious appears gratuitous under the aspect of eternity.

To avoid absurdity, then, we must stop taking our lives seriously.  Nagel's message, at least in his little 1987 text, seems to be that our lives are objectively meaningless whether or not we take ourselves seriously.  If we take ourselves seriously, then our lives are both meaningless and absurd.  If we stop taking our lives seriously, then our lives will be meaningless but not absurd.

We ought to distinguish two problems:

P1.  How are we to deal with the objective meaninglessness of human existence?

P2.  How are we to deal with the absurdity of human existence?

Nagel seems to be saying that we solve the first problem by simply accepting objective meaninglessness, and that we solve the second by taking short views and not worrying about the point or pointlessness of one's life as a whole: "The trick is to keep your eye's on what's in front of you, and allow justifications to come to an end within your life, and inside the lives of others to whom you are connected." (100)

Objective meaninglessness is not up to us: it is a given.  Absurdity, which for Nagel is indistinguishable from the sense of absurdity, is up to us: we can mitigate it by taking short views even if we cannot entirely eliminate it.

So absurdity is not much of a problem for Nagel. It certainly does not call for suicide or for existentialist heroics of the Camusian sort whereby man shakes his fist in defiance at the unintelligible and heartless universe.  Irony, Nagel tells us, is the proper response.

II

But is human existence objectively absurd?  Problem (P1) above presupposes that it is.  But is it?  Nagel gives an argument in WDIAM that we ought to examine.  Please note that he is is arguing, not from the sense of absurdity as he describes it, but from objective considerations.  Note also that his argument seems to contradict his rejection of the "chains of justification" argument he examines near the beginning of the 1971 article. (MQ, p. 12) The WDIAM argument seems to be the following.

1. If x has meaning, then x is a proper part of a whole within which it has its meaning.  Thus the particular activities and projects of my life have their existential meaning within the whole of my life.  Therefore

2. My life as a whole has meaning only if there is a wider whole within which my life as a whole has meaning.  Such a wider context might be my family, my profession, a political movement.

3. But each such wider context can be viewed from outside and questioned as to its meaning.  This includes the ultimate context if there is one, for example, God's plan for humanity.  Therefore

4. The ultimate context, if there is one, must be meaningless.  This is because nothing has meaning apart from a context, and no context is immune from questioning as to its point or purpose.  Therefore

5. Since the ultimate context must be meaningless, my life as a whole must be ultimately meaningless, whatever proximate meaning it may have for my family, my profession, the party, etc.

By way of illustration, consider the catechism answer to the question of the purpose of human existence: Our purpose is to love and serve God in this world and be happy with him forever in the next.  In Thomistic terms, the purpose of life is to achieve the visio beata, the Beatific Vision. 

Now should anyone who accepts this Thomistic answer be troubled by Nagel's argument?  He needn't be.  For the argument rests on a questionable assumption, namely, that no context is the source of its own meaningfulness.  Now that is true of all sub-ultimate contexts, but why should it be true of the ultimate context?

What is the point of the Beatific Vision? That is like asking, What caused God?  God is causa sui, a necessary being.  He is self-existent.  Similarly, the Beatific Vision is self-intelligible, self-purposive, self-significant. The buck stops there.

Of course, given the nature of our consciousness with its in-built duality of subjective and objective modes of consideration, we can question the point of the BV (or the VB if you prefer).  But we have no reason to think that this questioning by us reveals anything objective about the VB.  Similarly, one can question whether God exists and why God exists, but that does not show that there is a real distinction in him between essence and existence.

The fact that I can think of God as nonexistent does not show that God is not a necessary being.  The fact that I can wonder about the point of the ultimate context does not show that the ultimate context is without point, that it is not self-intelligible, self-purposive, and self-significant.

The sense of the absurd will always be with us in this life.  But the sense of the absurd does not entail objective or absolute absurdity.  Life can be absurd without being meaningless, just as it can be meaningless without being absurd.

Related articles

The Absurd: Nagel, Camus, Lupu

The Absurd Again: Weak and Strong Nagelian Theses

Senses of 'Absurd' and the Difference between Nagel-Absurdity and Absolute Absurdity

Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Overview

What is Reason? How Did it Arise? Nagel and Non-Intentional Teleology

Thomas Nagel, Heretic

Plantinga Reviews Nagel

The Absurd Again: Weak and Strong Nagelian Theses

This post is a sequel to The Absurd: Nagel, Camus, Lupu.  See it for bibliographical details and for background.

In his essay "The Absurd," Thomas Nagel maintains that "the philosophical sense of 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." (13)  But then, on the next page, Nagel shifts from the sense of the absurd to the absurd itself, telling us that "what makes life absurd" is the collision of "the two inescapable viewpoints," namely, the situated POV from which we live straighforwardly, immersed in our projects and taking them in deadly earnest, and the transcendental POV from which we coolly comtemplate our lives and everything else sub specie aeternitatis.

Nagel's question concerns the 'absurdity-maker.'  What is it that makes our lives absurd if they are absurd?  He begins his essay by dismissing three or so objective grounds of absurdity, among them, life's brevity and the 'size' argument: we are so tiny, the universe so vast.  (I discuss a particularly mephitic variant of this latter argument by Lawrence Krauss here.)  Nagel seeks and finds a purely subjective source of our absurdity: the collision within us of two points of view each of which is essential to our being the embodied consciousnesses we are.

Suppose we grant that our lives must appear absurd when we reflect upon them from on high, 'under the aspect of eternity.'  Does it follow that they are absurd?  What appears to be the case, and what cannot fail to appear to be the case for beings of our (present)constitution, might still not be the case.

It seems we can go two ways.  We can say: the sense of the absurd just is the absurd. (I noted that Nagel shifts from the first to the second between pp. 13-14.)  Or we can say that the sense of the absurd reveals the absurd.  If the latter, then my life is absurd whether or not I reflect on it sub specie aeternitatis. If the former, my life is absurd only when I so reflect.  It seems we ought to distinguish between a weak and a strong thesis:

Weak Absurdity Thesis:  The essential structure of embodied consciousness as we find it in our own case entails that our lives, when we reflect on them, must appear absurd, hence without objective meaning/purpose, whether or not in reality they are bereft of objective meaning/purpose.

Strong Absurdity Thesis: The necessary appearance of absurdity (when and so long as we reflect) just is the absurdity of human existence.  (Analogy: the percipi of felt pain = its esse.)  The sense of the absurd constitutes the absurd.  It does not reveal it.  We generate our absurdity simply by being what we must be and exercising the powers that we have.  Absurdity is essential to our embodied consciousness.  Our lives are objectively absurd, even though this absurdity is grounded in the nature of our subjectivity.

If the Weak Thesis is correct, then the problem of the absurd can be solved by refusing to take long views.  On the Weak Thesis, it is up to us whether life is absurd since the absurd just is the sense of the absurd and the sense of the absurd can be avoided by freely abstaining from occupying the transcendental standpoint.  It would then seem reasonable to take the following line:

For all we know, life has an objective meaning.  Let's leave that to God or the nature of things.  We shall live as if it is true while avoiding the sometimes paralyzing doubts that accrue from taking long views.  We shall focus on foreground concerns, live our lives with zest and committment, taking seriously what does appear serious from our situated perspectives, and view the ultimate solution to the cosmic  riddles as above our paygrade.

We might call this stance 'ostrich anti-absurdism.'  I am pretty sure that this is not what Nagel is advocating. I read him  as pushing the Strong Thesis.

The Weak Thesis, however, is much more plausible.  How does Nagel know that the sense of absurdity is veridical?  How does he exclude the possibility that, while our lives must appear absurd when we reflect, they are not in reality absurd?

Maybe your mother was right when she said, "You think too much.  Put down those books and go outside and play." 

Related articles

The Absurd: Nagel, Camus, Lupu

Long Views and Short Views: Is Shorter Better?

Should Nagel's Book Be on the Philosophical Index Librorum Prohibitorum?

Long Views and Short Views: Is Shorter Better?

The long views of philosophy are not to everyone's taste.  If not bored, many are depressed by the contemplation of death and pain, God and the soul, the meaning or meaninglessness of our lives.  They prefer not to think of such things and consider it best to take short views.  If as Thomas Nagel maintains, the contemplation sub specie aeternitatis of one's daily doings drains them of seriousness, one is under no obligation to take the view from nowhere.

Is it best to take short views? Sometimes it is. When the going gets tough, it is best to pull in one’s horns, hunker down, and just try to get through the next week, the next day, the next hour. One can always meet the challenge of the next hour. Be here now and deal with what is on your plate at the moment. Most likely you will find a way forward.

But, speaking for myself, a life without long views would not be worth living. I thrill at the passage in Plato’s Republic, Book Six (486a), where the philosopher is described as a "spectator of all time and existence." And then there is this beautiful formulation by  William James:

The absolute things, the last things, the overlapping things, are the truly philosophic concerns; all superior minds feel seriously about them, and the mind with the shortest views is simply the mind of the more shallow man. (Pragmatism, Harvard UP, 1975, p. 56)

I wrote above, "speaking for myself." The expression was not used redundantly inasmuch as it conveys that my philosopher’s preference for the long view is not one that I would want to or try to urge on anyone else. In my experience, one cannot argue with another man’s sensibility. And much of life comes down to precisely that -- sensibility. If people share a sensibility, then argument is useful for its articulation and refinement. But I am none too sanguine about the possibility of arguing someone into, or out of, a sensibility.

How argue the atheist out of his abiding sense that the universe is godless, or the radical out of his conviction of human perfectibility? If the passages I cited from Plato and James leave you cold, how could I change your mind? If you sneer at my being thrilled, what then? Argument comes too late. Or if you prefer, sensibility comes too early.

One might also speak of a person’s sense of life, view of what is important, or ‘feel for the real.’ James’ phrase, "feel seriously," is apt. To the superior mind, ultimate questions "feel real," whereas to the shallow mind they appear pointless, unimportant, silly. It is equally true that the superior mind is made such by its wrestling with these questions.

Maximae res, cum parvis quaeruntur, magnos eos solent efficere.

Matters of the greatest importance, when they are investigated by little men, tend to make those men great. (Augustine, Contra Academicos 1. 2. 6.)

Of course, with his talk of the superior and the shallow, James is making a value judgment. I myself have no problem making value judgments, and in particular this one. Evaluate we must.

Although prospects are dim for arguing the other out of his sensibility, civil discussion is not pointless. One comes to understand one’s own view by contrast with another. One learns to respect the sources and resources of the other’s view. This may lead to toleration, which is good within limits. For someone with a theoretical bent, the sheer diversity of approaches to life is fascinating and provides endless grist for the theoretical mill.  If the theoretician is a blogger, he has blog-fodder for a lifetime.

As for the problem of how to get along with people with wildly different views, I recommend voluntary segregation.

Related articles

The Absurd: Nagel, Camus, Lupu

The Absurd: Nagel, Camus, Lupu

I have been re-reading Thomas Nagel's seminal paper, "The Absurd," which originally appeared in The Journal of Philosophy, October 1971, and is collected in Nagel's Mortal Questions (Cambridge UP, 1979, 11-23.)  Damn, but it is good.  Nagel is one of our best philosophers.  He's the real thing.

Nagel's central contention is that human existence is essentially absurd.  Thus the absurdity of our predicament is not in any way accidental or contingent or due to some remediable (by God or man) disproportion or 'disconnect' between the demands of the human heart and mind for meaning and intelligibility, on the one hand,  and the world's 'indifference' to our concerns, on the other.  In this regard Nagel's position is far more radical than Camus' as the latter presents it in The Myth of Sisyphus.  For Camus, something is dreadfully wrong:  the world ought to meet our demands for meaning and intelligibility but it doesn't.  For Camus, absurdity is rooted in the discrepancy  between demand and satisfaction, a demand that in some way ought to be satisfied and therefore in some sense could be satisfied.  (The 'ought' in question is non-agential; here is some discussion of such oughts.)

Camus protests that things are not the way they are supposed to be, but they are, alas, the way they are, and so all we can do is shake our fists at the universe in defiance.  Nagel's posture is less heroic and more ironic. 

For Nagel there is no non-agential ought to have been otherwise or could have been otherwise with respect to the meaning of human existence: our lives are necessarily absurd because there is in us a conflict that is unavoidable, a conflict between our limited, perspectival, situated, individual  points of view and the transcendental point of view from which we observe ourselves  and everything else sub specie aeternitatis.  The general and philosophical sense of absurdity arises when these two points of view come into conflict.  Nagel speaks of "the collision between the seriousness with which we take our lives and the perpretual possibility of regarding everything about which which we are serious as arbitrary or open to doubt." (13) 

Immersed as I am in in my quotidian toilings and moilings, I take my life and its projects with utmost seriousness.  For example, the other day I went back into my archives to correct a minor mistake I had made in a post from years ago.  But while I was very concerned to make this correction and make it right, I was also aware of the 'absurdity' of being worried about such a bagatelle.  Who cares?   As transcendental spectator even I don't much care.  It is easy to detach oneself in thought from one's projects and purposes and very life and see them as arbitrary, contingent, and without objective meaning or purpose or significance.  What matters greatly from our situated perspectives can seem to matter not at all when we ascend to the transcendental perspective.    But of course I am not just a transcendental spectator of "all time and existence" (Plato, Republic) but also this here measly chunk of animated aging flesh with a very personal history and fate and a reputation to maintain. 

It is most marvellously true that I am a conscious and self-conscious being, projective of plans and purposes, sensitive to reasons as opposed to causes, and alive to the full range of the normative; but I am also an embodied conscious and self-conscious being with all that that entails: I can be crushed, blown apart, invaded by microorganisms, . . . .  Human existence cannot be reduced to the existence of specimens of a highly evolved zoological species, but I am a specimen of such a species.  Thus when we ask about the meaning of life we are really asking about the meaning of embodied consciousness.  I believe this is a very important point.  For it implies that the question cannot be addressed in a a wholly objectifying manner.

As I read him, Nagel is telling us that the root of absurdity is in us as embodied consciousnesses, not in the world or in any disproportion between us and the world.  It is an ineradicable root.  Both POVs are available to us -- and we must avail ourselves of both if we are to live fully human lives -- but they are necessarily in conflict.  Or so it seems.  If I am to live my life with zest and passion and commitment, then I cannot live the detached life of the transcendental ego who merely observes while his physical vehicle negotiates the twists and turns of this gnarly world.  (This is a deep and complicated theme requiring much more discussion.)  Borrowing some Heideggerian jargon we can say that for Nagel the sense of the absurd is constitutive  of human Dasein.  To be a fully awake human being, one who avails himself of both POVs, is to live with the sense of the absurd.  The only way to escape our absurd predicament would be by causing the cessation of embodiment (suicide) or by somehow-- via meditation perhaps-- emptying the 'I' out into something pre- or non-egoic.

I think it is important to point out that for Nagel and in truth the absurd exists only as the sense of the absurd.  This is another way of saying that the absurdity of the human predicament is not a merely objective fact if it is a fact: it involves consciousness/self-consciousness.

Is the absurdity of human existence a problem to be solved?  It cannot be a problem that we can solve since it arises necessarily from the collision of the two POVs both of which are essential to being human.  If the problem arises for a person, then that person cannot both solve the problem and continue to exist.  (This is not to say that the problem must arise for every person since not everyone exercises his capacity to reflect on matters under the aspect of eternity.)  Nor is absurdity a predicament.  To call a state of affairs a predicament is to suggest the possibility of extrication.  But there is no escape from absurdity.  So it is neither a problem nor a predicament. What is called for is not the defiant posturing of an Algerian existentialist but irony:  "If sub specie aeternitatis there is no reason to believe that anything matters, then that does not matter either, and we can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or despair." (23)

As for Peter Lupu, he seems to be maintaining  the exact opposite of what Nagel maintains.  Peter's thought seems to be that the meaning of an individual life is constituted  by the power to reflect.  Every agent of a life has this power essentially even if not all choose to exercise it.  Meaning is therefore not bestowed by the agent upon himself or by something or someone outside the agent such as God.  Existential meaning inheres in the agent's power to reflect on his life, his values, desires, and purposes.  For Lupu, meaning is not subjective .  Nor is it externally objective, imposed from without.  Every life is meaningful just in virtue of the agent's power to reflect.

I questioned whether existential meaning could be both objective and subjectively appropriable by all.  Lupu thinks he can answer this by saying that meaning is objective albeit internally objective in virtue of every agent's having essentially the power to reflect; but meaning is also subjectively appropriable by each agent if he chooses to actualize his power to reflect.  Here again is my aporetic tetrad:

A. If life has a meaning, then it cannot be subjective.

B. The meaning of life must be subjectively appropriable by all.

C. There is no meaning that is both nonsubjective and subjectively appropriable by all.

D. Life has a meaning.

Lupu solves my tetrad by rejecting (C) while accepting the remaining limbs.  Nagel, I would guess, would solve the tetrad by rejecting (D) while accepting the other limbs.

There are several questions I need to pose to Lupu, but for now let me just pose a Nagelian question/objection.  Nagel is surely on to something when he underscores the power of reflection to undermine the seriousness of our projects and make them appear arbitrary, contingent, and dubious.  When this power is exercised it collides with our tendency toward straighforward unreflective living under the guidance of taken-for-granted norms and values imbibed uncritically from the circumambient culture.  How can Lupu accommodate Nagel's point?  Is it not more plausible to hold that it is absurdity, not meaning, that is the upshot of reflection? 

The Aporetics of Existential Meaning

For present purposes, an aporia is a set of propositions each member of which has a strong claim on our acceptance, but whose members are collectively inconsistent.  Like many a philosophical problem, the philosophical problem of the meaning of life is usefully approached from an aporetic angle.  So consider the following aporetic tetrad:

A. If life has a meaning, then it cannot be subjective.

B. The meaning of life must be subjectively appropriable by all.

C. There is no meaning that is both nonsubjective and subjectively appropriable by all.

D. Life has a meaning.

Good  though not absolutely compelling reasons have been given for both (A) and (B).  But they are in tension with one another, a tension recorded in (C), the third limb of our aporetic tetrad. One who inclines towards compatibilism with respect to existential meaning inclines toward  the rejection of  (C).  Unfortunately, (C) is not easily rejected, as I will try to show in this post.  The main difficulty concerns the subjective appropriability of an objective purpose by all even if it is granted that there is an objective purpose applicable to all. 

First of all, one cannot appropriate an objective purpose unless one knows or at least has good reasons for believing that there is one.  More importantly, one must know what the purpose is and what one must do to live in accordance with it.  Three different questions: Is there an objective purpose? What is it?  How do I live in accordance with it?  Countless millions of people, however, have lived who lacked the abilities or the opportunities to form reasonable beliefs about these matters, let alone to come to have knowledge about them. It is not enough that the objective purpose be knowable by some; it must be knowable by all.  This was argued earlier.  But for the countless millions just mentioned there was no real possibility of appropriating the objective purpose.  By ‘real possibility’ is meant something far stronger than a mere logical possibility or even a nomological possibility.  It is logically and nomologically possible for a human being to run a four-minute mile.  But it is not possible for me and plenty of others to run that fast.  So even if it is logically and nomologically possible for all human beings to know the objective purpose of life, it does not follow that all have any serious possibility of knowing it.  It is as impossible for the countless millions just mentioned to know the objective purpose of life, supposing there is one, as it is for people like me to run a four-minute mile.  It follows that the objective purpose of life, supposing there is one, is not subjectively appropriable by all, which is to say that it is not subjectively appropriable in the way it would have to be for life to be objectively meaningful.  Again, if life has a meaning, it has a purpose, and the purpose must be the same for all and appropriable by all.  Redemption from absurdity must be possible for all if it is be possible for any.  If the world is so arranged that you are barred from redemption through no fault of your own, then my redemption is not a redemption from absurdity.

Those with the abilities and opportunities to investigate the three questions just mentioned are not in a much better position.  For they are confronted with a welter of conflicting doctrines. The fortunate have the leisure to inquire and the intellect with which to inquire, but our intellects are weak and the problems stare us down with a face of seeming intractability.  If all we have to rely on are ourselves and the resources of this world, then the conclusion to draw is that human life has no meaning that is both nonsubjective and subjectively appropriable.

Some will reply that what we cannot supply has been supplied by divine revelation.  But this is no real solution.  Even if God has revealed the purpose of human existence to us, together with the means of achieving that purpose, and in a way that respects our freedom and dignity, this will not do us any good  if  we do not know the purpose and how to achieve it.  That, however, is precisely what we do not know as is clear from the conflicting accounts of the content of revelation, not to mention conflict over whether revelation is actual or even possible.  All of these are ‘up for grabs’: the existence of God, the possibility of divine revelation, the actuality of divine revelation, not to mention its content and interpretation. If I merely believe in the content of a particular (putative) revelation, the Christian revelation for example, as interpreted in a certain way by a certain ecclesiastical authority such as the Roman Catholic magisterium, that is not good enough for it leaves me with reasonable doubts.  But as long as I doubt the meaning of life and must continue to inquire, I have not yet subjectively appropriated the objective meaning of life.  The subjective certainty of faith is not enough.  What is needed  is the objective certainty of knowledge.  And it must be available to all – which is not the case for those who lived before the time of the historical revelation.

D. Life Has a Meaning  

A case has been made for each of the first three limbs.  Should we therefore conclude that life has no meaning?  That would be hasty.  It is arguable, though not compellingly arguable, that the living of a life presupposes the objective meaningfulness of life.  E. M Adams writes,

Just as belief in the intelligibility of the world is presupposed by our quest for understanding, the meaningfulness of life is presupposed in living a life.  We have to believe that life is not absurd, that it is not a tale told by an idiot, that it makes sense, in order to keep on with the struggles of life. (“The Meaning of Life,” International Journal of the Philosophy of Religion 51, 2002, pp. 71-81.)

I take Adams’ point to be that we cannot live without presupposing that our lives have meaning, objective meaning, a meaning whose source is external to us.  One who believes, not just in his study, but throughout the activities of his life, that his life and its activities have only the meaning that he gives them must suffer a loss of motivation.  If he does not, he is simply fooling himself about what he really believes and lives in a state of self-deception, or else he conveniently forgets his theoretical conviction when it comes time to act.  He maintains at the level of theory that his life has only the meaning he confers upon it, but he ‘contradicts’ this theoretical belief by the energy and passion with which he pursues his projects and perhaps also by the passion with which he tries to convince the rest of us that nothing matters except what we make matter.  For if he fully appreciated what his subjectivism amounts to he would see that his acts of meaning-bestowal are as meaningless as everything else in his life. You could say that such a person has not subjectively appropriated his subjectivism.  This is true whether the subjectivism is extreme or moderate.

Living our lives with zest and vigor and passion and commitment, we presuppose that they are objectively meaningful.  One who denies this I would suspect of self-deception or a lack of intelligence or spiritual superficiality.  One who responds, “I live a rich and full life despite my conviction that life has no objective meaning applicable to all” simply does not appreciate the existential implications of what he believes.  This is a bold assertion, many will disagree with it, some will be offended by it, and I cannot prove it; but it is reasonable to maintain it. It must also be conceded that, even if we cannot live full lives without the presupposition of objective meaningfulness, it does not follow that there is an objective meaning.  It is not easy to exclude the possibility that what we must presuppose does not hold in fact.  We must presuppose the intelligibility of the world if we are to embark seriously upon the arduous quest for understanding, but it is logically and epistemically possible that the world is unintelligible in itself.  Likewise, we must presuppose the objective meaningfulness of life if we are to live rich and full and committed lives, but it is logically and epistemically possible that our lives are objectively meaningless nonetheless. 

But if these possibilities are actual, then all the more are our lives meaningless, for then the way things are thwarts us: there is a ‘disconnect’ between what we need and must presuppose and what is true.  Given that we cannot know that this is the case, we are entitled to believe that it is not the case.  It may be that the ultimate nature of the world is such as to frustrate our purposes.  But we cannot know this and there is no point in believing it, while there is every point in believing that the presupposition of meaning is true.  Our very lives are the ‘proof’ of it. When it comes to life and its living it is reasonable to hold that the ‘proofs’ will be vital and pragmatic rather than theoretical.  We are participants first and spectators second.  We are parts of the world-whole and we are beings of meaning; it is reasonable to extrapolate that the world-whole of which we are parts is also a world of meaning and intelligibility.  If we are wrong and the truth thwarts us, then why should we value truth?  With this I conclude my case that life has meaning, whatever that meaning might be.  It has some objective meaning or other and part of what contributes to the zest and passion and subjective meaningfulness of a life is the quest for that objective meaning.

Impasse

The limbs of the aporetic tetrad are all of them defensible, yet they cannot all be true.  I leave it to the reader to find his way forward if he can.  If nothing else, I have elucidated  the philosophical problem of the meaning of human existence and have blocked some facile (non)solutions.

The Meaning of Life Must be Subjectively Appropriable

The meaning of life, if there is one, cannot be subjective. This was argued in an earlier entry in this series on the meaning of life.  But the meaning of life cannot be purely objective either. The meaning of life, if there is one, must somehow involve a mediation of the subjective and the objective: the meaning of life must be subjectively appropriable.  I will now explain what I mean by ‘objective,’ ‘purely objective’ and ‘subjectively appropriable.’

An objective meaning or purpose of X is a purpose that is as it were assigned to X  from without. An objective purpose is exogenous while a subjective purpose is endogenous.  A purely objective purpose of X is one that is objective, but also such that X cannot subjectively appropriate or make its own the objective purpose. Thus if X has a purely objective purpose, then X plays no role in the realization or enactment or embodiment of its purpose.

A tool made for a specific purpose is an example of something that has a purely objective purpose. The Phillips head screwdriver  has the specific purpose of driving crosshead screws. It was designed for just that job. Such a tool has an objective purpose which derives from the plans and intentions of human artificers. To invert the famous formula of Jean-Paul Sartre's manifesto, "Existentialism is a Humanism," its essence precedes its existence. Artifacts like screwdrivers are produced according to a plan or design that is logically and temporally antecedent to their production. But the purpose of a screwdriver is not only objective, it is also purely objective in that there is no possibility of a screwdriver's subjectively appropriating its objective purpose. And this for the simple reason that no screwdriver is a subject of experience. It is not just that screwdrivers are not biologically alive; they lack subjectivity.  No inanimate artifact can discern its purpose, let alone freely and consciously accept or reject it. It makes no sense to speak of a screwdriver existentially realizing, or subjectively appropriating, or living, or enacting its purpose. The purpose a screwdriver has, it cannot be.  No screwdriver is in a position to complain that the purpose it has been assigned is not its purpose.

With us it is different. We may or may not have an objective purpose, but if we have one, it cannot be a purely objective purpose; it must be a purpose that can be made our purpose. But it is best to speak in the first-person. A purpose that I cannot make my purpose is of no consequence to me. Such a  purpose would be meaningless to me.  An objective purpose that I could not come to know about, or could not realize, or an objective purpose that I knew about and could realize but whose realization would destroy me or cause a preponderance of misery over happiness or thwart my flourishing or destroy my autonomy would  not be a purpose I could make my own. It is essential to realize that the question of the meaning (purpose) of human life arises within the subjectivity of the individual: it cannot be understood in a purely objective way. We are not asking about the purpose of a certain zoological species, or even of the purpose of a given specimen of this species viewed objectively, 'from outside.' The question, properly understood, is necessarily such that each must pose the question for himself using the first-person singular pronoun.  The question is not: What is the purpose of the human species? Nor is it: What is the purpose of this specimen of the human species? The questions are: What is the purpose of my existence? Why am I here? and the like. The question must be posed from within one's life, and not directed at one's life from a third-person point of view. It is man as subject who asks the question, man as Dasein in Heidegger's lingo, not man as object.

We can sum this up by saying that an objective purpose, if there is one, must be subjectively appropriable if it is to be relevant to existential meaning. To appropriate a thing is to make it one's own, to take possession of it. This is not to be taken in a crass material sense. To subjectively appropriate an objective purpose is to existentially realize it, to realize or embody it in one's Existenz (to borrow a term from the German existentialist lexicon). It is to adopt it freely and consciously and live it as an organizing and unifying principle of one's life. This subjective appropriation is obviously consistent with the purpose's remaining objective. It is a bit like realizing an ideal. If a couple realizes the ideal marriage, the ideal does not cease being ideal in being realized. Or if you do what you ought to do, your doing it, which is a translation of a norm into a fact, does not obliterate the distinction between facts and norms.  Similarly, the subjective appropriation of  an objective purpose does not render the purpose subjective; what is subjective is the appropriation, not the purpose.

Subjective appropriability has a normative element.  Suppose a slave knows the purpose assigned to him by his master and comes freely to accept that purpose as his purpose, a purpose he then carries out in his daily activities.  On my use of terms, although the slave has freely accepted the master’s purpose as his purpose, he has not subjectively appropriated the purpose.  And this for the reason that the slave’s acceptation is inconsistent with his autonomy and dignity.  The subjectively appropriable is not merely that which is able to be appropriated, but that which is worthy of being appropriated.  I take it as axiomatic that a meaningful life for a human being must be a life worthy of a human being.

What is meant by 'objective'? An objective purpose is (i) exogenous and (ii) available to all, the same for all, applicable to all.  But to avoid triviality, a codicil must be appended: the objective purpose cannot be a vacuously general meta-purpose. It cannot be something like: the purpose of life is to do whatever you want to do and can do within the limits of your situation. That would apply to everyone but in a vacuous way that would allow the purpose of life for one person to consist in exterminating Jews, for another in collecting beer cans, for a third in medical research, etc. The question about the meaning of life is not a question about a vacuously general meta-purpose, but about a substantively general first-order purpose.  An objective purpose must impose first-level constraints on our behavior.  At the same time, an objective purpose is one whose realization contributes to human flourishing.

But why must an objective purpose be available to all persons? Why can't it be available only to some and still be objective? Why couldn't some be excluded from the meaning of life, 'predestined' as it were to be left in the cold? It is built into the very notion of an objective purpose for rational beings that it be available to every rational being.  We have insisted that the philosophical problem of the meaning of life has an answer only if human life has an objective purpose, the same for all.  If this purpose were not also available to all, then it could not be claimed to be ingredient in an answer to the completely general philosophical problem, one that must not be confused with the psychological problem of the meaning of a life. This might sound  too sketchy to be satisfactory.  A bit more can be said.

One source of a sense of life's absurdity is the observation that suffering is irrationally distributed. An observation as old as Ecclesiastes and the Book of Job is that often the wicked prosper and the just suffer. Happiness and virtue are not properly adjusted one to the other in this life as Kant observed. Reason is scandalized, not by the mere fact of suffering, but by its intensity and unfair distribution. Now if human life, rational life,  has an objective meaning or purpose, then this meaning or purpose must be rational. This strikes me as a near-tautology: life cannot make objective sense unless it makes sense, i.e., is rational, understandable, intelligible. And if the objective meaning or purpose of life is rational, then no person can be arbitrarily excluded from partaking of it. For that would be a form of evil.  If the world’s constitution were such that only some rational beings could partake of life’s meaning, then that would be a decidedly suboptimal arrangement, indeed an evil arrangement. Recall our earier point that the meaning-of-life question can be formulated as a human or ‘anthropic’ question but also as a ‘cosmic’ question.  Anthopic 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?  My present point is that the world-whole must be such that no rational being is excluded from partaking in the objective meaning of life.  The meaning of life, if there is one, must be the same for all and available to all.  A rational world plays no favorites.  If the objective meaning of life were not available to all, then that would be an evil arrangement, one that could not be objectively meaningful.  An illustration follows.

On a theistic scheme, the objective purpose of life is to participate in the divine life. Now if God were arbitrarily to exclude some from participating in it, for no reason, but just as a display of power, that would make no sense. It would be irrational, and indeed evil. But then would it not be obvious that the meaning of life would not be guaranteed on such a theistic scheme? If God is an arbitrary despot, then God is a threat to life's having an objective meaning. A theism of divine despotism is a higher-order absurdity: both life here below and life beyond would be absurd on such a theism.  So I cannot see how life could have an objective purpose if that purpose is not available to all. It is perhaps not unnecessary to point out that not all will avail themselves of the available.

Putting together the results of this post and one preceding it in this series, we can say that the meaning of life cannot be subjective, but it must be subjectively appropriable, not just be some, but by all.

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The Question of the Meaning of Life: Distinctions and Assumptions

If Life Has a Meaning, Then it Cannot be Subjective

If Life Has a Meaning, Then it Cannot be Subjective

My title is my thesis.  This post has a prerequisite, The Question of the Meaning of Life:  Distinctions and Assumptions.  Read it first.

Extreme Subjectivism

We should distinguish between an extreme and a moderate version of the thesis that the meaning of life is subjective.  They can be referred to as extreme and moderate subjectivism about existential meaning.  ‘Subjective’ in my thesis covers both.  The thesis, agaiin, is that if life has a meaning, then it cannot be subjective.

Note that the subjectivist theory in either version  is intended to be identitarian as opposed to eliminativist. The subjectivist claim is not that there is no meaning, which would amount to nihilism.  The claim is that there is meaning but it is subjective by its very nature.  Nevertheless, despite its identitarian intentions, both extreme and moderate subjectivism collapse into nihilism as will be argued below.  As here used, ‘nihilism’ is just eliminativism about objective meaning.  So if  human life has a meaning, in the sense of ‘meaning’ relevant to the philosophical question about the meaning of life, then it cannot be subjective.

On extreme subjectivism any meaning or purpose your life has is one you give it. Meaning is conferred or bestowed on a life by the agent of the life.  In themselves, lives lack meaning, and they acquire meaning only when and if the agents of the lives impart meaning to them.  That a life has meaning and what that meaning is are both up to the agent.  This goes well beyond the notion that the agent’s appropriation of existential meaning is up to the agent.  For on any theory it is up to the agent whether he realize or live out  the meaning that he takes to be the meaning of his life.  Extreme subjectivism involves the further notion that the meaning the agent takes to be the meaning of his life is a meaning he takes from himself: it is a meaning he invents for himself. On extreme subjectivism, then, the agent freely decides (i) whether or not his life will have meaning, (ii) what meaning it will have, and (iii) whether and to what extent he will live out this meaning day by day.

Since a meaningful life cannot be merely purpose-driven but must also have positive value at least for the agent, one route to subjectivism is via the subjectivity of value: the  value of the goals one pursues ——  the goals in terms of which one's life assumes point and purpose —— is due to the individual's valuations, and  these valuations are irremediably subjective and thus potentially different for different individuals. Accordingly, no goal is objectively worth pursuing or objectively more worth pursuing than any other goal. By freely selecting which goals will constitute the point and purpose of his life,  the individual freely creates and maintains his own meaning and he freely creates it out of nothing or out of himself.  This endogenous theory of meaning  implies that there are no exogenous or objective constraints on existential meaning. A life has meaning if and only if the agent of the life is sincerely convinced that it does: your conviction that your life has meaning is both necessary and sufficient for its having meaning.

The extreme subjectivist view of existential meaning is deeply incoherent.  To be blunt, anyone who answers the meaning question by saying ‘The meaning of one’s life is the meaning one gives it’ simply has not understood the question.  The question arises concretely when one begins to doubt the value of the dominant projects and purposes one has been pursuing. A novelist, a stockbroker, a philosopher, a professional chess player, even if successful, can come to doubt the point of being a novelist, a stockbroker, a philosopher, a professional chess player.  ‘Have I wasted my life helping the rich get richer?’  ‘Have I dribbled my life away among bloodless abstractions in an illusory quest for an unattainable knowledge?’ ‘Am I squandering my life’s energies on a mere game?’ These are possible questions. Even if one has been entirely successful in achieving one’s life-goals, these questions can and do arise.  They are not questions about success or failure within a life-plan but questions about the success or failure of  a life-plan as a whole.  Anyone who sincerely asks himself whether he is wasting or has wasted his life presupposes by his very posing of the question that there are objective factors that bear on the question of the meaning of life.  To raise the question is to presuppose that existential meaning cannot be identified with agent-conferred meaning. One who wonders whether he is wasting his life perhaps does not thereby presuppose that there is exactly one recipe for a meaningful life applicable to all, but he does presuppose that there are one or more objectively meaningful uses of a human life. He presupposes that one can throw away one’s life, waste one’s time, fail to live a meaningful life.  But if the meaning of one’s life is the meaning one gives it, then one cannot fail to live a meaningful life since any meaning is as good as any other.  To tell such a person that it suffices for his life to have meaning that he invest it with meaning shows a failure to understand the question.  The person can respond with an analog of G. E. Moore’s Open Question Argument: “You tell me that the meaning of my life is identical to the style of life I choose as meaningful.  But is this style of life truly  meaningful?”  The fact that the question remains open even after the subjectivist answer has been proffered shows that the subjectivist answer is no answer at all.

So my first argument against extreme subjectivism may be summed up as follows.  The extreme subjectivist answers the question, What is the meaning of human life? by identifying existential meaning with agent-conferred meaning.  This answer, however, negates the presupposition of the question, namely, that one can waste one’s life and fail to live meaningfully.  Since the question obviously makes sense, but the answer negates the presupposition of the question, a presupposition essential to the very sense of the question, the answer is mistaken.

My second argument is that extreme subjectivism collapses into nihilism or eliminativism about existential meaning.  For if the meaning of my life is the meaning I give it, then my life has no meaning in the sense of ‘meaning’ that gave rise both to the question and the extreme subjectivist answer.  There is no real or nonverbal difference between ‘Human life is meaningless’ and ‘Human life has the meanings that agents give it.’  A conferred meaning is no meaning. Intellectual honesty demands that the subjectivist speak plainly and say ’Life has no meaning’ rather than obfuscate the issue by saying ‘Life has the meaning one gives it.’

My third argument is that extreme subjectivism entails a vicious infinite regress. If the activities of my life have only the meaning that I give them, then this would have to hold also for the acts of meaning-bestowal whereby certain goals and activities become meaningful for me. These acts, which are integral to my life, must be meaningful if my life is to be meaningful. But the acts of meaning-bestowal cannot be intrinsically meaningful on the subjectivist theory: nothing is intrinsically meaningful on the subjectivist theory, but meaningful only in relation to one who confers meaning.  So I must be the source of the meaning of my acts of meaning-bestowal if these acts are to have meaning. And this seems to lead to an infinite vicious regress. Suppose we spell this out.

Let A be an act of meaning-bestowal. A is either meaningful, meaningless, or neither. Those are the only three possibilities worth considering.  If A is meaningful, and no meaning is intrinsic as per the extreme subjectivist theory, then A can acquire meaning only if the agent freely bestows meaning on A by means of a distinct act of meaning-bestowal A*. Now if A* is meaningful, then its meaning must derive from a third act of meaning-bestowal A**. And so on into an infinite regress. The regress is vicious because every A is in need of a meaning that it cannot itself provide.

If, on the other hand,  A is meaningless, then the life of which A is a part is meaningless. For if a life is meaningful due to acts of meaning-bestowal, and these latter are meaningless, then the life as a whole is meaningless. Consider a person who organizes his life around the central goal of the alleviation of animal suffering. On subjectivism, this goal is worthwhile, not intrinsically, but only in relation to a free decision on the part of the agent to give it meaning and value. But if this free donation of meaning and value is itself meaningless, then it is difficult to see how the person's life can be said to be meaningful.  As soon as the agent reflects that the bestowal of meaning on his chosen purpose is not a response to any objective value such as the elimination of unnecessary suffering, he should see that his meaning-bestowal is a gratuitous and arbitrary and meaningless act.  A meaningful life, one wants to protest, is one in response to objective values, where one's responding is itself an objective value. But the objectivity of value is precisely what the subjectivist will not countenance.

Could it be said that the acts of meaning-bestowal are themselves neither meaningful nor meaningless inasmuch as they are at the foundation of all existential meaning?  It is difficult to attach any sense to this.  These acts of meaning-projection are integral to a life as meaningful. It is difficult to see how they could fail to be meaningful if the life of which they are parts is meaningful. So in the end the subjectivist appears to be astride the horns of a dilemma. Either the acts of meaning-bestowal are meaningful or they are meaningless. If the former, then a vicious infinite regress ensues. If the latter, then the life of which they are essential parts is meaningless.

Moderate Subjectivism

On moderate subjectivism about existential meaning there is due recognition of the fact that the satisfaction of certain objective conditions is necessary for a life to be meaningful, but this is held in tandem with the thesis that there is no general answer to the meaning-of-life question applicable to every life. So moderate subjectivism is midway between extreme subjectivism and objectivism.  On extreme subjectivism, the sincere conviction that one’s life has meaning is both necessary and sufficient for it to have meaning.  On moderate subjectivism, the  sincere conviction that one’s life has meaning is necessary but not sufficient for the life’s having meaning: consideration of objective factors, factors not in the control of the agent, are also relevant for assessing the meaningfulness of a life.  A moderate subjectivist will point out, for example, that not having one’s wants manipulated from the outside by other people, the media or the gods is a necessary condition of a meaningful life, and that this absence of manipulation is an objective factor. Other objective considerations are whether one’s chosen goal is achievable and not self-destructive.  If one’s central goal is to get drunk and stay drunk, then this goal is achievable but self-destructive, and meaningless because self-destructive.   The goal’s being achievable is an objective matter as is also its being self-destructive.   Despite these objective factors, there is on the moderate subjectivist approach no such thing as the meaning of life.  But on objectivism there is.  For the objectivist,  human life has meaning only if it has an objective purpose, the same for all, which is nevertheless subjectively appropriable by each, albeit in different ways. 

It is undeniable that moderate subjectivism is superior to extreme subjectivism.  It cannot be that the meaning of a life depends entirely on the agent of the life. Objective factors, factors outside of the control of the agent, come into consideration.  But it doesn’t follow straightaway that there is one objective meaning-conferring requirement that applies equally to all lives.  It may be that the blank  in ‘The meaning of life is _____’ cannot be filled.  This is John Kekes’ pluralistic view: “. . . there is no such thing as the meaning of life.”  The philosophical problem of the meaning of life “. . . has a general form, but it does not have a general solution.”  (John Kekes, Pluralism in Philosophy: Changing the Subject (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000, p. 83 et passim.)

Although there is no general solution, individuals can “resolve the problem for themselves.”  (Ibid.) So although there is no general answer to the meaning question, it is possible to list conditions individually necessary and jointly sufficient for a life’s being meaningful.  I won’t reproduce Kekes’ entire list but it includes such constraints as that the life not be pointless, misdirected, trivial, futile or vitiated by the belief that all human projects are absurd.  Crucial to his list are that the objective conditions of a meaningful life be located in the natural world,  and that the projects one pursues be either morally good, immoral, or nonmoral.  Kekes thereby rules out a general solution applicable to all in terms of religion or morality.  Irreligious and immoral lives can be just as meaningful as any life.  The life of a mass murder such as Stalin fulfills all of Kekes’ conditions for a meaningful life.  Kekes allows that religious and moral lives may be meaningful; what he disallows is that only religious and moral lives are meaningful.

The main problem with Kekes’ moderate subjectivism is that he changes the subject.  Since “Changing the Subject” is the subtitle of his book, Kekes is unlikely to see this as a problem. But it seems to me that it is since he substitutes the psychological problem of the meaning of life for the philosophical problem while at the same time seeming to be grappling with the philosophical problem. He tells us that the problem of the meaning of life “. . . has a general form but it does not have a general solution.”  He also tells us that individuals can “resolve the problem for themselves.”  But is there one problem that both lacks a general solution and can yet be resolved in many different particular ways (though not all particular ways given that certain objective constraints must be satisfied)? What would that one problem be?  It cannot be the philosophical problem of the meaning of life.  The philosophical problem is a completely general problem, and is not to be conflated with any psychological problem about the meaning of a life.  The distinction was esplained above near the end of section II.  If the philosophical problem has a solution, then it has a general solution.  For it is a general problem.

If an individual “resolves the problem of life for himself” in a sense that allows the resolutions to be different for different people, the problem he has resolved is not the impersonal philosophical problem but a personal psychological problem.    Suppose a twenty year old doesn’t know what to do with himself.  His life lacks direction.  But gradually he comes to ‘find himself.’  He manages to choose an attainable nontrivial nondestructive goal, one right for him, that satisfies all of Kekes’ constraints.  Our young man has surmounted his identity crisis and has  installed himself in a subjectively meaningful mode of existence.  He has solved a psychological  problem, a problem of adjustment and motivation,  but it cannot be said that he has “resolved for himself” the philosophical problem of the meaning of life.  The latter might not be a problem for him at all.  He may be firmly convinced that the purpose of human life is to serve God in this world and be happy with him in the next.  But he cannot decide which line of work to choose, or he doubts his abilities, or he cannot muster the motivation to persevere in anything, or ‘life throws him a curve ball’ in the form of ill-health or unrequited love or financial trouble.

My conclusion, then, is that moderate subjectivism as exemplified by Kekes’ position changes the subject: it does not address the philosophical problem of the meaning of life but diverts attention to a  related but distinct psychological problem.  Once the two questions are cleanly distinguished one sees that Kekes’ view is just as eliminativist about objective meaning as is the view of an extreme subjectivist like Richard Taylor.  What I am opposing in both is the identification of existential meaning with agent-conferred meaning, without the concomitant admission that such an identification collapses into an elimination of  existential meaning. This concludes my defense of the thesis that  If life has a meaning in the sense of ‘meaning’ relevant to the impersonal philosophical question about the meaning of life, then this meaning cannot be subjective, whether Taylor-subjective or Kekes-subjective.  It must be objective in the sense of being the same for all and applicable to all.

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The Question of the Meaning of Life: Distinctions and Assumptions

The Question of the Meaning of Life: Distinctions and Assumptions

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 ink 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.

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.  Of course, 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.

A meaningful life also bears an axiological aspect in that a meaningful life is one that embodies some if not a preponderance of positive noninstrumental 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 nontrivial and nonfutile 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 noninstrumental objective value.  A radically immoral life cannot be a meaningful life.

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 I were not a human animal.  If I were a finite pure spirit, 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.

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We Cannot Be the Source of Our Own Existential Meaning

On the Meaning of Life: Lupu Contra Vallicella

Bill reveals in his post, Could the Meaning of Life Be the Quest for the Meaning of Life, that he “toyed with the notion that the meaning of life just is the search for its meaning.” He concludes that if the meaning of life were merely the searching for it, then there would be no meaning, strictly speaking. Why? In Part A I outline Bill’s reasoning in the form of a reductio where (*) sentences are assumptions and (1*) is the assumption Bill entertains. In Part B I outline Bill’s argument that he gives elsewhere that supports the crucial premises of his Reductio Argument. In Part C I will show that his argument outlined in Part B is not sound and briefly describe a theory that is not subject to his argument. 

  

A. Bill’s Reductio Argument

 

 

Suppose for the sake of the argument that

 

 

1*. The meaning of life is identical to the search for meaning;

2. If the meaning of life is the search for it, then the meaning of life is subjective;

3. If the meaning of life is subjective, then life has no meaning;

4. If the meaning of life is the search for it, then life has no meaning; (from 2 and 3)

Therefore,

5. If life has meaning, then it cannot be identical to the search for meaning; (from 4)

Suppose one holds that

6*. Life has meaning.

It follows that

7. Necessarily, the meaning of life is not identical to the search for meaning.

Therefore,

7. (1*) is false.

 

 

BV responds:  So far, so good, except  that there is no call for the importation of the  modal operator 'necessarily' in (7).  (7) follows from the conjunction of (5) and (6), but from the necessity of the consequence one cannot validly infer the necessity of the consequent.  The modal fallacy is explained here.  I am not denying that (7) is necessarily true; I think it is.  My point is that its necessity is not supported by the premises Peter adduces. 

 

Bill wholeheartedly endorses the view that the search for meaning is necessary in order to enjoy a meaningful life. He rejects, however, (1*) (his (1)), I suspect due to something like the argument I outlined above. However, I do not think that Bill’s short post and my outline of his argument tells the most important part of the story; far from it.

B. Bill’s Sling-Shot Argument

Bill’s reductio argument heavily depends upon premises (2) and (3). Both are in dire need of justification. Bill offers no such justification in this post, but he does in some others. What justifies premises (2) and (3)? I will outline what I take to be Bill’s argument for (2) and (3) and call it “Bill’s Sling-Shot Argument”.

I think Bill has in mind an argument he gave in a previous post titled “We Cannot Be the Source of Our Own Existential Meaning” (Saturday, September 22, 2012 at 12:49 pm; henceforth, ‘EM’). We are assuming throughout that by ‘meaning’ we do not mean linguistic meaning, but rather what Bill calls existential meaning.

Bill thinks that any theory of meaning that identifies meaning with a source internal to the individual will ultimately collapse into an eliminativist theory: i.e., a theory that denies that there is any meaning to life. Premises (2) and (3) together summarize this view. It follows, then, that if there is going to be any meaning to life, then its source must be external to the individual.

Why should one think that any internalist theory of meaning collapses into an eliminativist theory? Bill offers what I have called the “Sling-Shot-Argument” in order to establish this claim. Bill thinks that all internalist theories are subject to the Sling-Shot Argument. Below is Bill’s Sling-Shot-Argument:

(SI) All internalist theories are committed to the view that the source of meaning is some action (typically mental) of individuals.

(SII) If the source of meaning is some action(s) of individuals, then meaning itself is a consequence of such actions.

(SIII) If meaning is a consequence of actions of individuals, then there cannot be any meaning prior to, and independently from, the resulting consequences of such actions.

(SIV) But “logically and temporally” (EM) individuals must exist prior to undertaking any meaning-bestowal actions and actions must exist prior to their consequences.

The above entails that:

(SV) “…the acts of meaning-bestowal and the subject whose acts they are, exist meaninglessly.” (EM) 4^th paragraph)

Therefore:

(SVI) “…my existence and my acts of meaning-bestowal are meaningless.” (ibid)

 

 

The “Sling-Shot-Argument”purports to show that any internalist theory must collapse into an eliminativist theory. Is the Sling-Shot-Argument sound? I don’t think so.

C. The Sling-Shot Criticized

 

 

I deny premise (SI) of Bill’s Sling-Shot-Argument: i.e., I deny that all internalist theories must hold that the source of meaning is some action of individuals and that, therefore, meaning is a consequence of such actions. I deny this premise because I think that it is compatible with an internalist theory to hold that the source of meaning (or its ground) is a certain kind of property that all individual agents possess; namely, the potential of self-reflection. Actions (mental or otherwise) enter the picture only as the means to realize this potential. The picture is this. The meaning of life is the potential to self-reflect. All agents have the potential to self-reflect in virtue of being agents. Therefore, all agents have meaning to their life essentially and not merely as a result of the consequences of undertaking certain actions. The more one self-reflects (i.e., performs suitable mental actions), the more one realizes this potential and, therefore, the more one fulfills the meaning of his life. So far as I can see, this version of an internalist account, which we may call The Potentiality Account of Meaning (PAM) is not vulnerable to Bill’s Sling-Shot-Argument. Therefore, such an internalist theory does not collapse into an eliminativist theory. Hence, Bill’s Sling-Shot-Argument is not sound. I view Thomas Nagel’s theory of the meaning of life as a good example of an internalist theory which is at heart a PAM.

 

 

 

BV asks: reference?

 

 

 

Nevertheless, I agree with Bill that (1*) is too strong. The meaning of life is not identical to the search for meaning, if by ‘search’ we mean undertaking certain actions the consequences of which result in a meaningful life. On the other hand, if we think of searching for meaning as essentially a self-reflective activity, then searching for meaning is essential in order to realize the meaning of our life; namely, the potential we already posses. Therefore, viewed in this light, searching for meaning just is part of having meaning.

 

 

 

Response

 

 

 

 

Peter tells us that we have a certain power or potential, the potential to reflect upon our lives.  I of course agree. Peter then goes on to say, rather more controversially, that "The meaning of life is the potential to self-reflect."  His thought is that our lives have meaning in virtue of their possession of a certain dispositional property (the property of being disposed to self-reflect).  This is a property that we all have, and indeed essentially as opposed to accidentally.    Since we have the property essentially, it is not in our power to either possess it or not, which implies that our possessing it is not a consequence of anything we say or do.  The possession of theproperty is thus not a consequence of acts of meaning bestowal.  So if the meaning of life consists in the possession of this dispositional property, then the meaning of life is objective as opposed to subjective.  And yet on Peter's theory, meaning is endogenic rather than exogenic: it has its source in us, not in something outside of us such as God.  Peter's theory, then, is a theory on which the meaning of life is both objective and internal. 

 

 

If Peter is right, then I am wrong.  For what I maintain is that internalist theories of existential meaning, according to which meaning is conferred upon one's life by acts of meaning-bestowal, are unable to confer meaning upon the objective presupposition of meaning-bestowal, namely, the acts themselves and their subjects, which acts and subjects must be logically and temporally prior to the meanings bestowed.  In consequence, internalist theories deliver only subjective meaning.  But if the meaning of life can only be subjective, then there is no such thing as THE meaning of life.

 

Do I have a good reason to reject Peter's theory?  He tells us that "The meaning of life is the potential to self-reflect."  But surely the actual meaning of my life -- if it has one -- cannot be identified with a power I possess, a power that is what it is whether or not it is ever exercised.  A man who lives the unexamined life, who goes through life unreflectively, never pondering the why or the wherefore, arguably lives a meaningless life despite his power to reflect.  I am assuming that one cannot live meaningfully without choosing and appropriating meanings -- which acts require reflection.  But now suppose our man begins  to actualize his reflection potential.  Now his life begins to acquire actual meaning  by his choices and decisions.  But now the problem I raised arises again.  The decisions and choices whereby a person's life acquires actual and concrete meaning are, in themselves, meaningless, as is their subject.

 

 

Peter is telling us that there is a property objective and essential possession of which by individuals confers existential meaning upon them.  But of course they cannot have this or any property unless they exist.  Since their existence cannot be accounted for by their possession of this or any property, the meaning (purpose) of their existence cannot be accounted for by possession of this or any property.

 

I go to Peter.  I ask him, "What is the purpose of my existence?"  He tells me, "The purpose of your existence and of every agent's is to reflect on its existence."  That seems no better than saying: You exist for no purpose except to reflect on your purposeless existence.

 

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We Cannot Be the Source of Our Own Existential Meaning

Could the Meaning of Life be the Quest for the Meaning of LIfe?

Could the Meaning of Life be the Quest for the Meaning of LIfe?

I  have toyed with the notion that the meaning of life just is the search for its meaning.  But this is really no better than saying that the meaning of life is subjective: posited and maintained by the agent of the life, and potentially different for different agents.  If the meaning of human life is subjective, however, then it has no meaning. Similarly, if the meaning of life is exhausted in the search for life's meaning, then there is no meaning apart from the search, which is to say that life has no meaning, strictly speaking.  The following, then, is a nonstarter:

1. The meaning of human life consists in the quest for its meaning.

But (1) is to be distinguished from

2. No human life can count as truly meaningful unless some portion of it is devoted to raising, investigating, and answering for oneself the question as to the meaning of human life.

(2) I heartily endorse.  The difference between (1) and (2) is that (1) identifies the quest for meaning with meaning whereas (2) does not.

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We Cannot Be the Source of Our Own Existential Meaning

Mortalism Again

What It's All About

I knew a guy who maintained that getting married and having kids was "what it's all about."  I incline to the view that figuring out what it's all about is what it's all about.  And depending on how seriously one takes that task, one might decide that having children is contraindicated.  When Prince Siddartha got word that his wife had bore him a son, he name him 'Rahula,' meaning fetter.  Or so the story goes.

Does God Give His Existence Meaning?

Chad McIntosh writes,

Your post We Cannot Be the Source of Our Own Existential Meaning touches on a puzzle that I’ve been wrestling with for several years now. I’d greatly appreciate your thoughts on the following.

Like you, I think meaning is bestowed, or endowed, by agents. However, I may hold a stronger view, which is captured by what I call the Endowment Thesis:

(ET) Any object x has meaning iff x has meaning by virtue of being endowed meaning by one or more agents.

BV:  In the post in question I did not endorse the thesis that meaning is bestowed by agents; I made the conditional claim that if existential meaning is bestowed by each upon himself, then the identification of existential meaning with subjectively bestowed meaning collapses into an elimination of existential meaning.  But your (ET) is plausible and its consequences are worth exploring.

(In fact, I normally state ET as true of value, not meaning. But I think ET holds for both value and meaning. But I’ll follow your post and state the puzzle with meaning instead of value). 

BV:  I think existential meaning has both a teleological and an axiological side.  Thus a meaningful life is a purpose-driven life, but not every purpose-driven life is meaningful: the purpose must have positive intrinsic value. If someone sets himself as the central  task of his life the  parsing of every sentence in Moby Dick, his life has purpose; but since the value of such an accomplishment is questionable, the same goes for the meaningfulness of a life consecrated to such a task.   See Teleological and Axiological Aspects of Existential Meaning.

The puzzle arises when we stipulate that x is God, God has meaning (or is a meaningful being, has a meaningful existence), and that God is the sole inhabitant of a world. So: God has meaning iff God has meaning by virtue of being endowed meaning by one or more agents.

There are two ways this could work: Either God, as a single agent, endows himself meaning, or God is in some way more than one agent (God is whole of which agents are parts—as agents, the parts can endow each other value, and God has meaning by virtue of each of the parts having meaning).

Now, both possibilities seem to require us to say that God does not have meaning logically prior to being endowed meaning (which leads me to think you may reject ET).

BV:  Yes.  Neither God nor Socrates can bootstrap himself into existence.  And it seems that the same goes for meaningfulness: neither can bootstrap his existence into meaningfulness.  So what I argued in my post with respect to finite agents like us holds also for God.  It cannot be the case that God gives his existence meaning. Not even God can be a subjectivist about existential meaning!

But the former possibility—where God has meaning by virtue of endowing himself meaning—requires making sense of endowing oneself meaning, which you—as well as I—find problematic. I have my own objections to this possibility, but I’m curious to what you think of it. Assuming (ET) is true, can God sans creation endow himself meaning (or value)? Would your arguments in the post apply to God with equal force here?

BV: Yes, it seems to me that the arguments apply to God with equal probative force.

Also, I hope we can bracket divine simplicity for the sake of the argument. Thoughts?

BV:  These considerations seem to add up to an argument against your (ET).  The universal quantifier 'any' causes trouble.  But surely some (many, most)  objects are such that their meaning, value, and purpose are not had by them intrinsically but are bestowed upon them by one or more agents acting individually or collectively.  I may assign a rock the purpose of being a paper weight, a purpose that it does not have intrinsically, and to a book that has collectively been assigned a purpose I can add an idiosyncratic purpose such as serving as a door stop or to fuel a fire.  I can use a topographical map to swat a fly, and a flyswatter to scratch my back or direct an orchestra.  Or consider the value of water.  That value, it seems, is not intrinsic to water, but it is also not assigned by me or you or all of us collectively.  But it is relative to our physical need for the stuff.  Water is not intrinsically valuable, else it would be good for electronic gear, paper, and fires.

So it seems safe to say that some purposes, values, and meanings are relative to agents even if those agents don't have the power to assign them arbitrarily.

As for God, he is a counterexample to (ET).  God does not have a purpose because he assigns himself one; he is intrinsically purposive, intrinsically good, intrinsically valuable, intrinsically meaningful.  This intrinsicality would be nicely underpinned by the divine simplicity, but it is not clear that one needs that doctrine to underpin it. 

Now suppose there is no God.  Then human existence is ultimately (as opposed to proximately) meaningless, purposeless, and valueless. But we have the sense that  it is none of these.  This sense gives us reason to seek God, even though it does not furnish materials for a compelling proof of the existence of God.

I have gone out on a limb here, which will afford you an opportunity to practice your sawing skills.

We Cannot Be the Source of Our Own Existential Meaning

Some say that life has no meaning except the meaning that we, individually, give it.  Thus the meaning of my life is the meaning I give my life, and the meaning of your life is the (perhaps different) meaning that you give your life, and that, apart from these individual projects of meaning-bestowal, one's life has no meaning.  Thus meaning does not come from God or der Fuehrer or il Duce or the government (as some contemporary liberals seem to think) or the state or society or other people, or anything exogenic, but comes, if it comes at all, from the wellsprings of one's own selfhood.

One could call this subjectivist theory  an identity theory of existential (as opposed to linguistic) meaning:  there is such a thing as the meaning of an individual human life, but what that meaning is is identical to the meaning the individual in question gives to its life.  By contrast, an eliminativist theory of existential meaning would have it that there is no such thing as existential meaning.

Now it seems to me that the subjectivist identity theory just sketched is untenable, precisely for the reason that it cannot be kept from collapsing into an eliminativist theory.  (This is a special case of how identity theories, which attempt to reduce A to B without denying the existence of A,  often collapse into eliminativist theories. See here and here for more on the general issue.) 

Note that if I must first give my life meaning, if it is to have some, then it has no meaning prior to and independent of my giving it meaning.  And yet I must exist prior (both logically and temporally) to the decisions, resolutions, declamations, and whatnot whereby I give my life meaning.  This implies that the acts of meaning-bestowal and the subject whose acts they are, exist meaninglessly.  These acts, however, are mine, and their subject is me.  It follows that my existence and my acts of meaning-bestowal are meaningless. 

The attempted identification of meaning with subjectively bestowed meaning collapses into an elimination of meaning.

What we have here is a 'bootstrap problem.'  Just as I cannot bootstrap myself into existence, i.e., cause my own existence (since that would require me to exist before I exist), I cannot bootstrap my existence into meaningfulness, i.e., bring it about that my existence has meaning.  Just as I cannot exist before I exist, I cannot have meaning before I have meaning.  I cannot be the source of my own meaning.

If the only meaning my existence has is the meaning I give it, then that I exist at all is meaningless.

At the Zoo: The Aspiring Animal

And here we have an animal who aspires.  Unfortunately, his aspirations arise from a material substratum that mocks them, and whose collapse will soon enough spell their end.  Or so it seems.  If the seeming is so, is not the life of these animals absurd?