Category: Human Predicament

Knowing Less

Knowing less of a person is often better for good relations than knowing more. The old forms and formalities have their uses. They come from a time when human nature was better understood, and it was understood that civility is better served by reserve than by 'letting it all hang out.' They come from a time when it was taken for granted that there is such a thing as human nature.

The Cautionary Tale of Pippa Bacca

Conservatives take a sober and realistic view of the world and the people in it. They are reality-based, and put no faith in utopian schemes. Like good Aristotelians, they take the actualities of the present and the past as a reliable guide to what is possible, rather than the future-oriented fabrications of a high-flying reason cut loose from experience. They admit the reality of evil and the corruption of human nature. Liberals and leftists, by contrast, tend to believe that people are basically good and that it is only extraneous factors that corrupt them.  Evil has no purchase in reality for them but is merely a word we apply to those whose beliefs and values differ from ours. 

Immanuel Kant wisely wrote of the "crooked timber of humanity of which no straight thing has ever been made." For liberals and leftists, however, the warpage is not inherent in the timber but comes from without, from contingent social arrangements that can and must be changed.

People who live this delusion sometimes come to a very bad end. Performance artist Pippa Bacca is a case in point. She and a friend hitchiked from Italy to the Balkans to the Middle East in wedding dresses to promote global harmony.  Just three weeks into the trip she was raped and murdered in Turkey by a driver who offered her a ride.

The refusal to face reality is a mark of the leftist who prefers his u-topian view of the world to the world.

Institutional Corruption

Without institutions, where would we be?

But they are all corrupt, potentially if not actually, in part if not in whole, and constantly in need of reform. The Roman Catholic Church is no exception despite its claim to divine sanction and guidance.

You should be skeptical of all institutions.  Like the houses out here, they either have termites or will get them.

But institutional corruption reflects personal corruption. Institutional corruption is the heart's corruption writ large. So you should be skeptical of all persons, including the one in the mirror.

Especially him, since he is the one you have direct control over.

The Higher Hypocrisy

A man is only a man. If he tries to live like an angel, he may end up a hypocrite attempting the impossible.  A man ought to live up to his highest possibilities. But what they are and where they lie is unknown until he seeks them out, risking hypocrisy as he does so. There is the hypocrisy of those who make no attempt to practice what they preach. And there is the hypocrisy of those who have the will to practice what they preach but cannot practice it because their ideals are too lofty for them. 

The Afterlife of Habit Upon the Death of Desire

Desire leads to the gratification of desire, which in turn leads to the repetition of the gratification.  Repeated gratification in turn leads to the formation of an intensely pleasurable habit, one that persists even after the desire wanes and  disappears, the very desire without whose gratification the  habit wouldn't exist in the first place.  Memories of pleasure conspire in the maintenance of habit. 

The ancient rake, exhausted and infirm, is not up for another round of debauchery, but the memories haunt him, of pleasures past.  The memories keep alive the habit after the desire has fled the decrepit body that refuses to serve any longer as an engine of pleasure.

And that puts me in mind of Schopenhauer's advice.  "Abandon your vices before they abandon you."

Friendships Superficially Satisfying

I had known him for years. Our friendship was an acquaintanceship that remained on the surface. Never having gone deep, it never drifted toward the hazards the deep waters hide: the differences that most truly define and distinguish us, but also oppose us to others. And so when he died I could not bring to mind a false word, a sarcastic expression, a competitive tension, or a joke that hid a jab. Not one unpleasant memory sullied my recollection.

Such superficial friendships are perhaps perfect for an imperfect world in which there is more of seeming than of being. We do well to value the surfaces in a world of surfaces.  The surfaces are sure; the depths are dubious. On life's surface those who meant little but brighten memory count for more than those who meant more but haunt and disturb from a past their presence makes dark.

The Childless as Anthropological Danglers

The Austrian philosopher and Vienna Circle member Herbert Feigl wrote about nomological danglers.  Mental states as the epiphenomenalist conceives them have causes, but no effects. They are caused by physical states of the body and brain, but dangle nomologically in that there are no laws  that relate mental states  to physical states.

The childless are anthropological danglers.  They are life's epiphenomena. They have ancestors (causes) but no descendents (effects). Parents are essential: without  them we could not have come into fleshly existence.  But offspring are wholly inessential: one can exist quite well without them.

There is a downside and an upside to being an anthropological dangler. 

The downside is that it unfits one for full participation in the life of the community, removing as it does weight and credibility from one’s opinions about pressing community concerns. As Nietzsche writes somewhere in his Nachlass, the man without Haus und Hof, Weib und Kind is like a ship with insufficient ballast: he rides too high on the seas of life and does not pass through life with the steadiness of the solid bourgeois weighted down with property and reputation, wife and children.  What does he know about life and its travails that his say should fully count?  His counsel may be wise and just, but it won't carry the weight of the one who is wise and just and interested as only those whose pro-creation has pro-longed them into the future and tied them to the flesh are interested.  (inter esse)

The upside to being an anthropological dangler is that it enables one’s participation in a higher life by freeing one from mundane burdens and distractions. In another Nachlass passage, Nietzsche compares the philosopher having Weib und Kind, Haus und Hof with an astronomer who interposes a piece of filthy glass between eye and telescope. The philosopher's vocation charges him with the answering of the ultimate questions; his pressing foreground concerns, however, make it difficult for him to take these questions with the seriousness they deserve, let alone answer them.

Someone who would be "a spectator of all time and existence" ought to think twice about binding himself too closely to the earth and its distractions.

Another advantage to being childless is that one is free from  being an object of those attitudes of propinquity — to give them a name — such as embarrassment and disappointment, disgust and dismissal that ungrateful children sometimes train upon their parents, not always unjustly.

The childless can look forward to a time when all of their blood-relatives have died off.  Then they will finally be free of the judgments of those to whom one is tied by consanguinity but not by spiritual affinity.

This opinion of mine will strike some as cold and harsh.  But some of us experience more of the stifling and oppressive in our blood relations than the opposite.   I do however freely admit that the very best human relations conceivable are those that bind people both by ties of blood and ties of spiritual affinity.  If you have even one blood relation who is a soul mate, then you ought to be grateful indeed. 

Related: SEP entry on Herbert Feigl

Man as Onion?

Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind and Other Aphorisms (New York: Harper & Bros., 1955), p. 62, Aph. # 96: 

Man's being is neither profound nor sublime. To search for something deep underneath the surface in order to explain human phenomena is to discard the nutritious outer layer for a nonexistent core. Like a bulb man is all skin and no kernel.

I disagree completely. Man is no onion or bulb, surface all the way down, with a nonexistent core. "Man is a stream whose source is hidden." (R. W. Emerson, "The Over-Soul") The central task of life is not to write merely clever aphorisms, but to return to the Source.

Or perhaps I should say that what the stevedore says is true — of extroverts.

Related: Seriousness as Camouflage of Nullity.  (On the topic of death.)

On Making a Splash and Making a Dent

Years ago an acquaintance wrote me about a book he had published which, he said, had "made quite a splash." The metaphor is unfortunately double-edged. When an object hits the water it makes a splash. But only moments later the water returns to its quiescent state as if nothing had happened.

Perhaps it would have been more in the spirit of self-promotion to say that his book had made quite a dent. A splash is ephemeral and what makes it sinks. A dent, however, lasts and the denting object remains in sight.

On second thought the first is the more apt metaphor given the quality of the book in question. It captures both the immediate significance of an event and its long-term insignificance.

On Taking Pleasure in the Death of Enemies

Is it Schadenfreude to take pleasure in the death of an enemy? Only if it is bad to be dead. But it is not clear that it is bad to be dead. On the other hand, if it is bad to be dead, it might still not be Schadenfreude to take pleasure in the death of an enemy. 

For I might take satisfaction, not in the fact that my enemy is dead, but that he can no longer cause me trouble.

But you want to know what Schadenfreude is.  This is from an earlier post:

If to feel envy is to feel bad when another does well, what should we call the emotion of feeling good when another suffers misfortune? There is no word in English for this as far as I know, but in German it is called Schadenfreude. This word is used in English from time to time, and it is one every educated person should know. It means joy (Freude) at another's injuries (Schaden).

The great Schopenhauer, somewhere in Aphorismen zur Lebensweisheit, remarks that while envy (Neid) is human, Schadenfreude is diabolical. Exactly right. There is something fiendish in feeling positive glee at another’s misery. This is not to imply that envy is not also a hateful emotion to be avoided as far as possible. Invidia, after all, is one of the seven deadly sins. From the Latin invidia comes ‘invidious comparison’ which just means an envious comparison.

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.

BenigniWhen 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.   

Related articles
Maverick Philosopher: David Benatar on the Quality of Human Life, Part I
David Benatar in <i>The New Yorker</i>
Life and Thought