Maverick Philosopher

All of these things and a few others, but above all: the wisdom to be satisfied with what one has. In particular, no hankering after more material stuff; no lusting after a bigger house, a newer car, a bigger pile of the lean green.

So much for middle-sized happiness. It falls short of true happiness for various reasons one of which is that one cannot be truly happy in the knowledge that many if not most will never have even the possibility of attaining middle-sized happiness.

Another reason meso-eudaimonia is not true happiness is that it it under permanent threat by impermanence, which argues the unreality of everything finite, as noted in an earlier meditation. But middle-sized happiness has an irrefragable advantage over true happiness: it is certain for those who have attained it for as long as they abide in it. And when it is over, there are the memories, and the knowledge that nothing that happens can change what was, which fact confers upon what was a modality the Medievals called necessitas per accidens, accidental necessity. True happiness, however, the happy life St Augustine speaks of, is uncertain and for all we know chimerical. You can believe in it, of course; but I for one am not satisfied with mere belief: I want to know.

Perhaps it is like this: one day you die and become nothing for ever. Anyone who claims to know with certainty that death is annihilation is most assuredly a fool. But it still might be the case that the death of the individual is the utter destruction of the individual.

Well, suppose that is the case: you die, you are utterly dead, and that's it. All of that struggling and striving and caring and contending and loving and despairing come to nothing. You and all your works end up dust in the wind. Your fall-back position is this meso-eudaimonia I have been scribbling about. You have it in your possession; it is here free and clear and certain while it lasts. Part of it is the rational hope that there is some sort of completion unto true happiness if not here below (which is arguably impossible), then yonder. A hope exists whether or not its intentum is realized. So, immanently speaking, you have the benefit of hoping whether or not the goal is ever attained.

But take away the hope, and then what do you have? If you believe that it is all a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, then you ought to find life more difficult to construe as meaningful. Indeed, if you really believe this, can you live it without flinching, without evasion?

It is a curious predicament we are in. If you believe in this Completion of the fleeting present whether in a temporal eschaton or in eternity, and the Completion doesn't exist, then in a sense you are being played for a fool. If, on the other hand, you believe both that life is a tale told by an idiot, etc., and that it is nonethless meaningful, then you are also being played for a fool: you are playing yourself for a fool.

In the immortal words of Brenda Lee, "Am I fool number one, or am I fool number two?"

The refutation of this lowering of one's spiritual sights and acquiescence in middle-sized happiness is death and impermanence. Impermanence argues unreality. It did so for Plato, and rather more recently it did so for Nietzsche the anti-Plato in a backhanded way. What is the Eternal Recurrence of the Same if not a mad attempt at wringing eternity from flux by one who was "grieved by the transitoriness of things" as he put it in a letter to Franz Overbeck? All metaphysicians, East and West, feel the unreality of the impermanent. That's what makes them metaphysicians. If wonder is the feeling of the philosopher, as Plato said in the Theaetetus, the sense of the unreality of the impermanent is the feeling of the metaphysician.

What is impermanent (anicca) is unreal (anatta) and thus also unsatisfactory (dukkha). To lose oneself in the ultimately unsatisfactory can strike the metaphysician as horrifying. Death, as signalling radical and irreversible change, is the muse of philosophy. What Jack London in John Barleycorn called "The Noseless One" refutes myopic worldliness.

To one on his deathbed, this fleeting life, about to vanish, must appear empty and worthless, much ado about nothing, a vain struggling and jockeying for position in a parade going nowhere. But the possiblity of death is here right now for all of us, and this metaphysical insecurity demonstrates the impossibility of myopic world-immersion for one who sees clearly. One cannot be satisfied by a merely mundane meaning. Whether or not life has an ultimate meaning, one cannot live meaningfully except in quest of it.

You say you are capo di tutti capi in the actual world in respect of such-and-such? That may be so, but for how long? It is quite easy to be flying high in April, but shot down in May. And what about all the other possible worlds in which you exist, not to mention the ones in which you do not exist? To really be the best in respect of F-ness you would have to be maximally F (assuming F-ness admits of degrees) in every possible world. You would have to necessarily F (F is every possible world) and not just essentially F (F is in every possible world in which you exist). But to be really the best it is not enough to be the best in respect of one attribute; you would have to be necessarily F for all values of 'F.' But you wouldn't want to be the best in respect of slovenliness or stupidity, so it looks as if being the best entails being the ens reallisimum. But the competition for that job is stiff indeed.

A little thought along these lines should convince one that the project of besting others is doomed from the start. In the end we are all going to lose at the comparison game, the game of "competitive finite selfhood," to borrow a fine phrase from a fine book by A. E. Taylor. So why not try to be oneself? It is impossible to be the best, but the actualization of one's individuality is within the realm of possibility. Not easy, given the toxic state of contemporary society, but possible.

Collateral reading: Kierkegaard, Royce.

Thus his life acquired point and purpose. Would that he could have found a purpose doing something positive from the start. Sobriety, fiscal responsibility, lack of obesity -- these should be 'default settings' of a human life, starting points, not goals.

It strikes me as decidedly suboptimal to start life as a screw-up and then spend the rest of your life unscrewing yourself. There is something pathetic about people whose whole quest in life is to lose weight, get rid of credit card debt, and learn to get along with other people.

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 our very own 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 univere 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. And I am sure Mangan doesn’t in general either, as witness his thoughts on Brahms.

Although prospects are dim for arguing the other out of his sensibility, especially in matters political, civil discussion is not pointless. One comes to understand one’s own view by contrast with another. One learns to respect the sources of the other’s view. That may lead to toleration, which is good within limits. (Radical Islamists and others who do not respect the principle of toleration must not be tolerated, but opposed and in some instances killed.)

Apart from the pleasures of civil discussion, and the understanding of self and other that it often engenders, there is the solitary pleasure of inquiry which is undoubtedly the highest of pleasures as Aristotle recognized. For someone with a theoretical bent, the sheer diversity of approaches to life is fascinating and provides endless grist for the theoretical mill.

If death is the utter annihilation of the individual person, then life is ultimately senseless and ultimately hopeless. This cannot be evaded by saying that one's life can acquire meaning if it is placed in the service of the lives of others. For their lives too (and the lives of their progeny and their progeny's progeny ad indefinitum) are, on the annihilationist assumption, ultimately senseless and hopeless. Human life is in every case the life of an individual; so even if human beings existed at all times, that would do nothing to insure ultimate meaningfulness.

Of course, there are proximate meanings, hopes, and purposes even if ultimately it is "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." One can lose oneself in them. But to do so involves self-deception: one has to mistake the proximate for the ultimate. One has to burden fleeting concerns with a meaning they cannot bear. One has to fool oneself.

For example, one has to fool oneself that writing a book, starting a company, founding a family are all ultimately meaningful when the only way they could have any ultimate meaning is if they were part of a life that had a direction that wasn't about to be cut short in a few years.

To put it bluntly, we have no future if naturalism is true. But we cannot live without meaning. An existential trilemma looms. Either we cultivate self-deception by ascribing to fleeting concerns ultimate meaning, or we recognize their transiency and ultimate meaninglessness when considered in and of themselves and put our faith and hope in a transcendent meaning, or, avoiding both self-deception and the life of faith, we embrace nihilism.

Now I don't expect any naturalist to accept what I just said. I will be told that it is a false trilemma. There is a fourth way: one can live in and for the finite without self-deception. That will perhaps be followed by the claim that one who looks to the infinite is more justly accused of self-deception.

The four paths can be given names: the way of Nietzsche's Last Man; the way of Faith; the way of Nihilism; the way of Nietzsche's Zarathustra.

It is no easy task to decide among them. But decide we must.

Filed under: Against Naturalism, Meaning of Human Existence