Charlie Rose told this blatant lie during his 60 Minutes interview of Steve Bannon. I never thought much of Rose, but now I think even less of him. And of course he refused to distinguish between legal and illegal immigrants. Bannon was too restrained. He should have punched back harder.
Month: September 2017
First Philosophy or Scientism?
I was going to add to this old draft from 15 December 2009, but it looks like I won't be getting around to it. So here it is.
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Robert Cummins (Meaning and Mental Representation, MIT Press, 1989, p. 12) regards it as a mistake "for philosophers to address the question of mental representation in abstraction from any particular scientific theory or theoretical framework." Thus we ought not naively ask, What is mental representation? as if there is something called mental representation that is common to folk psychology and such theories as orthodox computationalism and neuroscience. "Mental representation is a theoretical assumption, not a commonplace of ordinary discourse."
The right way to proceed, according to Cummins, is to "pick a theoretical framework and ask what explanatory role mental representation plays in that framework and what the representation relation must be if that explanatory role is to be well grounded." In other words, one takes a theory such as orthodox computationalism and then one asks: what must the nature of mental representation be if this theory is to be both true and explanatory?
So the question of mental representation is not a question of 'first philosophy,' i.e., a question to be settled independently of, and prior to, empirical research, but a question in the philosophy of science exactly analogous to the following question in the philosophy of physics: what is the nature of space given that General Relativity is true and explanatory? The properties of physical space are for physics to determine. Philosophy's role is correspondingly modest, that of a handmaiden. To coin a phrase: philosophia ancilla scientiae, philosophy is the handmaiden of science, similarly as it was the handmaiden of theology in the Medieval period. Philosophy becomes the philosophy of science. And according to Quine, who is quoted by Cummins on the fontispiece of his book, "Philosophy of science is philosophy enough."
It ought to be the same, Cummins thinks, with psychology. Whether or not there are mental representations becomes the question whether or not the best theories in cognitive science and psychology posit mental representations, and the nature of the representation relation is to be read off from whichever theory is taken to be true and most explanatory.
But there is a problem with this view. If we want to know about physical space and the nature of matter, we turn to the physicist. And if we want to know about the brain, we turn to the neuroscientist. But if we want to know about the relation of mind and brain, we cannot base ourselves solely on empirical science.
Here is one consideration. The extant empirical theories imply the existence of mental representations. But surely their existence is not obvious. Looking at a photograph of a mountain, I become aware of the mountain and some of its features via the picture. Here it makes sense to say of the picture that it is a representation of the mountain. But when I look directly at a mountain, there is no phenomenological evidence of any epistemic intermediary or representation: I see the mountain itself. I don't see sense-data or representations or any kind of epistemic deputy.
Perhaps I will be told that I am nonetheless aware of an internal image but not aware of being aware of it. Compare the case of walking into a room and seeing a depiction of Hillary Clinton so realistic and convincing that I take it to be Hillary herself. In such a case I am aware of an image, but not aware of being aware of an image. Why couldn't it be the same with outer perception? One crucial difference is that I can come to be aware of the Hillary-image as an image. But I cannot come to be aware of any supposed internal image that mediates my outer perception. This is particularly obvious if the internal image is a brain state. I cannot, while gazing at the mountain, 'focus inwardly' and become aware of the brain state that is supposedly mediating my perception of the mountain. Given this fact, I suggest that it is unintelligible to say that there is an internal image that mediates outer perception. The word 'image is' being misused. An image that I cannot become aware of as an image is in no intelligible sense an image of something.
No doubt the brain and its states are part of the causal basis of perception. And there is no doubt that an organism's brain is in (some) of the states it is in because of what is happening in its environment, e.g., bright light is being reflected from a snow field into the organism's eyes. But to say that some of the brain states represent the environment makes no sense assuming that 'represent' has the sense it has when we attend to the phenomenology of representative consciousness. To speak of material representations literally in the head is to read back into a third person conception of the world notions that make sense only from a first-person point of view.
You may agree with what I just said or not. But the discussion we will have about these matters surely does not belong to any empirical science. It belongs to first philosophy. The question of whether there are mental representations at all, for example, cannot arise within disciplines that presupposes their existence. And the relation between a first- and third-person view of the world cannot be treated within an exclusively third-person point of view. Finally, there is the point that the claim that science alone can clarify these questions is itself unscientific and so an instance of (negative) first philosophy.
Is Blogging a Good Use of Time?
I sometimes think that it is not, but then I get a comment like the following:
Your blog is much more instructive than most of my formal education. Thank you for that.
Numerous comments like this, for which I am grateful, convince me that it is a good use of time.
There is no Systemic Racism
The Democrat Party is a party of race-hustlers. Clear proof of this is their endlessly repeated lie about 'systemic' or 'structural' or 'institutional' racism. David Horowitz, Big Agenda (Humanix, 2017), p. 51:
While institutional or systemic racism has been illegal in America for 50 years, the 2016 Democratic Party platform promises that "Democrats will fight to end institutional and systemic racism in our society." There is no evidence that such racism actually exists. It is asserted in a sleight of hand that attributes every statistical disparity affecting allegedly "oppressed" groups to prejudice against them because of their identity. This "prejudice," however, is a progressive myth. This is not to say that there aren't individuals who are prejudiced. But there is no systemic racism in America's institutions, and if there is, it is already illegal and easily remedied.
The Dem's race-obsession is an amazing thing to behold. With every passing day it becomes more insane. An Asian man becomes the focus of a controversy because his surname 'Lee,' which is a mere sound-preserving transliteration of some Asian characters, reminds some idiots of Robert E. Lee. Soon thereafter, a banana peel ignites a controversy at Ole Miss. One can only hope that the Dems keep it up and destroy themselves. They have found that playing the race card has gotten them what they want in many cases. But they need to think twice about transforming every card in the deck into a race card. For while the leaders of the party are extremists, many of the rank and file retain a modicum of common sense.
Saturday Night at the Oldies: The Forgotten and Underplayed
Betty Everett, You're No Good, 1963. More soulful than the 1975 Linda Ronstadt version.
The Ikettes, I'm Blue, 1962.
Lee Dorsey, Ya Ya, 1961. Simplicity itself. Three chords. I-IV-V progression. No bridge.
Paul Anka, A Steel Guitar and a Glass of Wine, 1962.
Carole King, Crying in the Rain, 1963. The earnest girl-feeling of young Carole makes it better than the Everly Bros.' more polished and better executed version.
Don Gibson, Sea of a Heartbreak. A crossover hit from 1961. It's a crime for the oldies stations to ignore this great song.
Ketty Lester, Love Letters, 1961. Gets some play, but not enough.
Find the Linguistic Howler
For all his insights about the pathologies of the modern left, Mark Lilla has not divested himself of the most ubiquitous intellectual quirk of today’s establishment liberal: He equivocates the common good with the electoral success of the Democratic Party. Lilla is not trying to convince leftists that they stand to learn anything from voters in Appalachian West Virginia or rural Missouri. He’s just trying to convince them to be able to stand their presence long enough to win their votes.
"But it's a good article, Bill, and the author is obviously a youngster; why seize on a linguistic peccadillo while ignoring the content of his piece?"
Because I'm the nastiest, surliest, prickliest, language Nazi north of the Rio Grande and west of the Pecos. I love language even more than I hate libruls.
UPDATE:
Dave Bagwill comments:
J'accuse you of being a glossophile!
Guilty as charged! But I plead innocent of graphomania:
"Graphomania inevitably takes on epidemic proportions when a society develops to the point of creating three basic conditions:
- An elevated level of general well-being, which allows people to devote themselves to useless activities;
- A high degree of social atomization and, as a consequence, a general isolation of individuals;
- The absence of dramatic social changes in the nation's internal life. (From this point of view, it seems to me symptomatic that in France, where practically nothing happens, the percentage of writers is twenty-one times higher than in Israel)."
How to Stifle Policing
The Obama Era continues to hinder police effectiveness.
Dianne Feinstein and the Anti-Catholic Bigots
It came out, thanks to the WikiLeaks disclosures during the 2016 campaign, that Hillary Clinton’s aides were trading nasty notes about Catholics, calling them “severely backwards.” The Dems had long been the party of anti-Catholic bigotry and the exposed emails only confirmed that reputation.
American bishops appointed by Pope Francis didn’t make a peep about Hillary’s anti-Catholic bigotry for the simple reason that they share it. They, too, see believing Catholics as “severely backwards.” Many of the Francis-appointed bishops, such as Chicago’s Blasé Cupich, were in the tank for Hillary. Patrick McGrath, the bishop of San Jose, California, used propaganda from the Hillary campaign as his crib notes, penning a ludicrous column to parishioners in which he said that Donald Trump “borders on the seditious.”
Cupich joined Illinois Senator Dick Durbin at Democratic dog-and-pony shows to push amnesty and socialism. Cupich’s sermons were indistinguishable from Hillary’s stump speeches.
But even with this help, even after decades of left-wing infiltration of the Church, Hillary couldn’t win the Catholic vote. Trump’s gibe at the Al Smith dinner — “here she is tonight, in public, pretending not to hate Catholics” — rang true for many Catholics in the pews.
Liberals Need to Preach What They Practice
Liberals who have amounted to something in life through advanced study, hard work, deferral of gratification, self-control, accepting responsibility for their actions and the rest of the old-fashioned virtues are often strangely hesitant to preach these conservative virtues to those most in need of them. These liberals live Right and garner the benefits, but think Left.
They do not make excuses for themselves, but they do for others. And what has worked for them they do not think will work for others. Their attitude is curiously condescending. If we conservatives used 'racist' as loosely and irresponsibly as they do, we might even tag their attitude 'racist.'
It is the 'racism' of reduced expectations.
It is not enough to practice what you preach; you must also preach what you practice.
Law professors Amy Wax and and Larry Alexander have recently come under vicious fire for pointing out the obvious: many of our social problems are rooted in a collapse of middle-class cultural norms. But it is a good bet that the leftist scum who attacked them live by, and owe their success to, those very same 'racist' norms. It is an equally good bet that they impose them on their children.
Now let me see if I understand this. The bourgeois values and norms are 'racist' because blacks are incapable of studying, working hard, deferring gratification, controlling their exuberance, respecting legitimate authority and the like?
But surely blacks are capable of these things. So who are the 'racists' here? The conservatives who want to help blacks by teaching them values that are not specifically white, but universal in their usefulness, or the leftists who think blacks incapable of assimilating such values?
Or is it something like the opposite of 'cultural appropriation'? Is it that whites violate and destroy black 'culture' by imposing on blacks white values that blacks cannot appropriate and turn to use? But of course the values are not 'white' but universally efficacious.
Just as self-control helps keep me alive, self-control would have kept Trayvon Martin alive if had had any. And the same goes for Michael Brown of Ferguson.
Kimball on Stove on Race
Roger Kimball, Who Was David Stove? Excerpt:
Stove’s essay “Racial and Other Antagonisms” is similarly emollient. He begins by noting that some degree of friction is the common if not the inevitable result when “two races of people have been in contact for long.” Only in the twentieth century, however, has such antagonism been described as a form of “prejudice.” Why? Earlier ages had the concept, and the word. Part of the reason, Stove suggests, is that by christening racial animosity “racial prejudice” we transform it into an intellectual fault, i.e., a false or irrational belief that might be cured by education—and this, Stove observes, “is a distinctly cheering thing to imply.” Alas, while it is certainly true that racial antagonism is often accompanied by false or irrational beliefs about the other race, it is by no means clear that it depends upon them. And if it doesn’t, education will be little more than liberal window dressing.
Stove’s essay on race is full of discomfiting observations. He defines “racism”—a neologism so recent, he points out, that it was not in the OED in 1971—as the belief that “some human races are inferior to others in certain respects, and that it is sometimes proper to make such differences the basis of our behaviour towards people.” Although this proposition is constantly declared to be false, Stove says, “everyone knows it is true, just as everyone knows it is true that people differ in age, sex, health, etc., and that it is sometimes proper to make these differences the basis of our behaviour towards them.” For example,
if you are recruiting potential basketball champions, you would be mad not to be more interested in American Negroes than in Vietnamese… . Any rational person, recruiting an army, will be more interested in Germans than in Italians. If what you want in people is aptitude for forming stable family-ties, you will prefer Italians or Chinese to American Negroes. Pronounced mathematical ability is more likely to occur in an Indian or a Hungarian than in an Australian Aboriginal. If you are recruiting workers, and you value docility above every other trait in a worker, you should prefer Chinese to white Americans. And so on.
Stove readily admitted that some of these traits may be culturally rather than genetically determined. But he went on to observe that “they are still traits which are statistically associated with race, well enough, to make race a rational guide in such areas of policy as recruitment or immigration.” As I say, David Stove would not have been made to feel welcome at many American colleges or universities.
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It can't be racist if it's true. Now what Stove says above is true, except when he says that "everyone knows it is true." There are people who sincerely believe it to be false. But surely most of us know that it is true even if we won't admit it publicly. In any case, what Stove says above is true, and it can't be racist if its true, whence it follows that Stove violates ordinary usage when he defines 'racism' as he does. And that is a foolish thing to do. Meaning is tied to use, and only a linguistic Don Quixote tilts against the windmills of prevalent usage. To shift metaphors, some words and phrases are just not candidates for semantic rehabilitation.
Stove needs a different word. Whatever word that is, it won't be 'racism.' 'Racism' is currently used to label an attitude of irrational hatred of members of a race not one's own precisely because they are members of a race not one's own.
It is obvious that one's acceptance of the Stovian truths does not entail that he bears any racial animosity to anyone.
I have just engaged in some clear thinking and truth-telling. But what's the point in a world becoming stupider and crazier by the day?
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).
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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.
The Decline of the West Proceeds Apace: Reed College
I arise from a blissful session on the black mat, 3:10 – 4:00 AM, only to log on and find:
Under pressure from student protesters, Reed College in Portland, Oregon is considering whether or not to continue requiring freshmen to take a Western civilization course.
Once again, abdication of authority on the part of university admins. There is no coward like a university administrator. May they be treated rudely by the barbarians they enable. Suggestion to the thugs: take a page from China's Cultural Revolution and force the admins and profs to clean toilets.
The Role of Reich in the Widening Gyre
Wilhelm that is. I read his The Function of the Orgasm many moons ago, not long after I read a reference to him and his orgone accumulators in Kerouac's On the Road, which made it onto the Amazon 100 list. The Orgasm book did not. Neither did Reich's Mass Psychology of Fascism, also in my library.
The Amazon 100
It's a crappy list, but I've read ten good titles on it. How about you? Keith Burgess-Jackson's read five.
1. 1984, by George Orwell
2. A Brief History of Time, by Stephen Hawking
27. Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens
40. Man's Search for Meaning, by Viktor E. Frankl
46. On the Road, by Jack Kerouac
59. The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger
61. The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen
67. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
87. The Stranger, by Albert Camus
88. The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway
David Benatar, The Human Predicament, Introduction
My plan is to work my way through David Benatar's latest book, The Human Predicament, Oxford UP 2017, chapter by chapter. Herewith, some notes on the Introduction, pp. 1-12. I will summarize the main points and add such critical comments as seem appropriate.
Benatar appreciates that the human condition is a predicament, an unsatisfactory state of affairs that calls for some sort of amelioration or escape. For Benatar, however, our predicament is a tragic one from which there is no escape. We are caught in an "existential vise" between life and death. "Life is bad, but so is death." Neither are bad in every way, but both are "in crucial respects, awful." (1-2) We are in a bind, a fix, a jam, we can't get out, and there is no one to help us.
Cosmically viewed, our lives are meaningless. "We are insignificant specks in a vast universe that is utterly indifferent to us." (2) I would say that indifference is a human attitude, a deficient mode of caring. So I would put Benatar's point by saying that the universe is not even indifferent to us. That our lives are ultimately meaningless is of course consistent with our lives being suffused with various mundane or proximate meanings and purposes.
Some might grant that our lives are cosmically or ultimately meaningless, but take this to be just an axiologically neutral fact, neither good nor bad. This is not Benatar's view. It is bad that our lives are ultimately meaningless. We cannot satisfy the need for meaning in the mundane.
But not only are our lives meaningless, the quality of our lives is very poor: "even the best lives . . . ultimately contain more bad than good."(2) That's a very strong statement. It implies that no matter how good your life is, it is more bad than good.
Is death then a welcome release from our nasty predicament? No! Death too is bad, pace Epicurus and his followers: ". . . death is the second jaw of our existential vise." (2) It is bad that we will all be annihilated in the near future. I take him to mean not just that dying is bad, but being dead is as well, even if there is no one who is aware of one's being dead. Life is bad and death is bad and the squeeze is on.
Benatar is a resolute mortalist. There is no immortality of the soul or resurrection of the body. Nor is there any hope for transhumanist life extension here below.
Suicide, although sometimes both rational and morally permissible, is not a satifactory solution to our predicament because of its negative effects on others and because it issues in annihilation. (3)
Overall, Benatar is a pessimist, but he is not pessimistic about everything. For example, convinced as he is that there is no immortality, he considers it optimistic to hold that immortality would be bad (because it would be boring). It is good that there is no immortality given that it would endlessly boring. So even though annihilation is bad, immortality would be worse. (4-5) On this point he is optimistic!
There are no good reasons in support of the standard optimistic answers to life's big questions. To the extent that optimistic answers are actually believed, they are believed because people want to believe them. Those who cannot bring themselves to accept the optimistic answers and yet will not face reality are left in a state of bewilderment. (7)
For Benatar, life's big questions have answers knowable to us here and now. (One could hold that the big questions have answers, but not answers accessible to us in our present state. Or one could hold that there are answers that no one will ever know.) Benatar is not a solubility-skeptic: the problem of the meaning and value of human life is not an aporia as I tend to think. Nor is he a mysterian. "There is no great mystery, but there is plenty of horror." (7)
Our condition is a predicament, Benatar insists, and none of us can avoid the horror of it. Palliation is possible, but not a cure.
Benatar concludes the Introduction by considering whether he is justified in depriving people of their optimistic delusions. He concludes that he is justified in the relatively mild, non-crusading, way he has to chosen to do so: by writing books. For optimistic delusions, he thinks, are not innocuous, and are justifiably combated.
For one thing, the delusions ". . . facilitate a reproduction of the human predicament by creating new generations that are thereby thrust into the predicament." (10) A second reason is that putatively "redemptive ideologies," whether religious or secular, often "cause a great deal of gratuitous suffering." (10)