Without institutions, where would we be? But they are all corrupt, potentially if not actually, in part if not in whole. The Roman Catholic Church is no exception despite its claim to divine sanction and guidance.
Bernard Law died yesterday in Rome at the age of 86, a pariah who was granted a kind of protective custody in a Roman basilica by the Vatican.
Law, who distinguished himself as a civil rights activist while serving in Mississippi and Missouri, came to act as the chief facilitator of the sex abuse scandal that rocked the Boston archdiocese and sent shock waves across the nation and around the world. (here)
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. 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.
Jean van Heijenoort was drawn to Anne-Marie Zamora like a moth to the flame. He firmly believed she wanted to kill him and yet he travelled thousands of miles to Mexico City to visit her where kill him she did by pumping three rounds from her Colt .38 Special into his head while he slept. She then turned the gun on herself. There is no little irony in the fact that van Heijenoort met his end in the same city as Lev Davidovich Bronstein, better known as Leon Trotsky. For van Heijenoort was Trotsky's secretary, body guard, and translator from 1932 to 1939.
The former 'Comrade Van' was a super-sharp logician but a romantic fool nonetheless. He is known mainly for his contribution to the history of mathematical logic. He edited From Frege to Godel: A Source Book in Mathematical Logic, 1879-1931 (Harvard University Press 1967) and translated some of the papers. The source book is a work of meticulous scholarship that has earned almost universally high praise from experts in the field.
One lesson is the folly of seeking happiness in another human being. The happiness we seek, whether we know it or not, no man or woman can provide. And then there is the mystery of self-destruction. Here is a brilliant, productive, and well-respected man. He knows that 'the flame' will destroy him, but he enters it anyway. And if you believe that this material life is the only life you will ever have, why throw it away for an unstable, pistol-packing female?
One might conclude to the uselessness of logic for life. If the heart has its reasons (Pascal) they apparently are not subject to the discipline of mathematical logic. All that logic and you still behave irrationally about the most important matters of self-interest? So what good is it? Apparently, van Heijenoort never learned to control his sexual and emotional nature. Does it make sense to be ever so scrupulous about what you allow yourself to believe, but not about what you allow yourself to love?
SOURCES (The following are extremely enjoyable books. I've read both twice.)
Anita Burdman Feferman, Politics, Logic, and Love: The Life of Jean van Heijenoort, Boston: Jones and Bartlett Publishers, 1993.
Jean van Hejenoort, With Trotsky in Exile: From Prinkipo to Coyoacan, Harvard UP, 1978.
If we were just animals, no problem. If we were pure spirits, no problem. Concupiscence is a problem because we are spiritual animals. Neither angels nor beasts, we 'enjoy' dual residency in opposing spheres. The problem is not that the flesh is weak while the spirit is willing. The problem is that the spirit is fallen and wills the wrong thing: inordinate sensuous pleasure for its own sake.
The animal in us plays along supplying the playground for the spirit's perversity. The sins of the flesh do not originate there, but in the spirit. The flesh is merely the matter in which they are realized.
Or perhaps what I've just written, which is pretty standard MavPhil 'boilerplate,' is nonsense.
Maybe it is like this. Whatever 'spirituality' there is in us is merely a sickness that impedes our vitality and conjures up the ghosts of sin and guilt and free will and moral scrupulosity and talk of concupiscence. I never did get around to reading Ludwig Klages, Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele, though I can guess at his dark vision.
The powerful take what they want. The weak, who want what the powerful want but are too impotent to acquire it, invent morality.
As I said, a dark vision. And one to be found in the identity-political of the present day, both on the Right and on the Left.
You understand that I am not endorsing the dark vision.
We desire intimacy with human others but we must combine it with reserve.
And this for three reasons: out of respect for the Other and her inwardness; from a sober recognition of our fallen tendency to dominate; and out of a need to protect ourselves.
The wise do not wear their hearts on their sleeves, but neither do they suppress Bukowski's bluebird.
Here is Epicurus as quoted by Pierre Hadot in a book I highly recommend, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault (Blackwell 1995, p. 87):
We must concern ourselves with the healing of our own lives.
He proposes a TETRAPHARMAKOS, a four-fold healing formula:
God presents no fears, death no worries. And while good is readily attainable, evil is readily endurable.
This strikes me as just so much whistling in the dark. How can one be so cocksure that physical death is the annihilation of the self? Shakespeare's Hamlet, in his soliloquy, saw the difficulty:
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 . . . .
And is evil "readily endurable"? See for yourself whether that proposition stands up to a close reading of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago or any other catalog of human horrors.
The Hellenistic systems, the systems of late antiquity (Stoicism, Skepticism, and Epicureanism), despite their riches and insights offer us no real solution to the human predicament, a fact of which Augustine was well aware.
Whether or not there is a cure, man cannot be his own doctor.
. . . would this world and the people in it be as intellectually stimulating?
Men and women of my stripe love to beat their heads against puzzles, problems, mysteries, and every type of conundrum.
Well, Lord, you have certainly given us fodder for brain-bashing. And if this world is, as your top reps maintain, a divine fiction, one dependent in its Dasein and Sosein moment-by-moment, then I must say you have done a mighty fine job. It seems so bloody real and self-existent as to exclude you as author and itself as just divine text.
One seizes upon a present good, sensuous pleasure, even though it is transient and ultimately unsatisfactory, over a merely possible lasting future good to be had by foregoing the present good.
We speak of formative influences; why not also of deformative influences? Parents and siblings, family and friends, church and school, the rude impacts of nature, the softer ones of language and culture — all contribute to our formation but to our deformation as well. The learning of a craft is a formation, but as Nietzsche sagely observes, "Every craft makes crooked." If so, every formation is a deformation.
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.
To be competitive and indeed successful in this world often demands a level of self-assurance and inner certainty that is incompatible with acknowledgment of the sober truth about oneself. This is especially the case in the upper reaches of the political game. So perhaps we should forgive Hillary her pathetic, self-serving book, What Happened. She is a leftist for whom the political is everything. How can one expect her, at the end of her career, to enter into the equanimity that permits a balanced view of things? She is no philosopher. Ever the activist, she is incapable of calming down sufficiently to see things in perspective.
The human predicament has its tragic sides. One is that success is too often predicated upon inordinate self-confidence and blindness to faults.
Cesare Pavese (1908-1950), This Business of Living, Diaries 1935-1950, Transaction Publishers, 2009, p. 126, from the entry of 10 December 1939:
Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours seem short and the years long.
A very sharp observation. Unfortunately, most of Pavese's diary is not at this level of objective insight. It is mostly self-therapy, a working though of his misery and maladjustment and self-loathing. For example,
And one can understand the innate, ravening loneliness in every man, seeing how the thought of another man consummating the act with a woman — any woman — becomes a nightmare, a disturbing awareness of a foul obscenity, an urge to stop him, or if possible destroy him. Can one really endure that another man — any man — should commit with any woman the act of shame? Noooo. Yet this is the central activity of life, beyond question. . . . However saintly we may be, it disgusts and offends us to know that another man is screwing. (p.64)
Has the poet come too much under the influence of Stile Nuovo? There is the tendency of romantics, and Italians are romantics, to put women on pedestals and make 'angels' of them. The thought of sexual intercourse, were it possible, with an angel or with a woman one has angelicized is admittedly repulsive.
Dark is the morning that passes without the light of your eyes.
At funerals one hears pious claptrap about the dearly departed going home to the Lord. In many cases, this provokes a smile. Why should one who has spent his whole life on the make be eager to meet his Maker? Why the sudden interest in the Lord when, in the bloom of life, one gave him no thought? He who loves the things of this world as if they are ultimate realities ought perhaps to hope that death is annihilation.
The ersatz immortality of progeny is a poor substitute for the genuine article, as is 'literary' immortality. Ditto for the miserable after-existence of a merely intentional object in the fallible and flickering memories of a few acquaintances not known for the justice of their assessments, acquaintances themselves slated for the Reaper's scythe.
