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.