Whatever we are here for, we are not here to pass time. Our time is to be used and used well. You say it doesn't matter how we spend our time since nothing matters? That may or may not be so. But it matters which. If something does matter and you live as if nothing matters you may end up not only having wasted your time but your eternity as well. So time spent getting to the bottom of this question is time well spent.
Category: Meaning of Life
What’s It All About?
The question makes sense. Variant: What's it all mean? Ron Crumb's Mr. Natural has an answer for you:
The answer illustrates the use of' 'shit' as a quantifier, an 'urban quantifier' if you will. This predicament we are in — call it life — doesn't mean anything. The 'urban' use of 'shit' is an interesting linguistic bagatelle that I explored some years back in a delightful post entitled Quantificational Uses of 'Crap.' But the meaning, point, purpose of life is no bagatelle, linguistic or otherwise.
I find it unutterably strange that we might die, become nothing, and never find out what it was all about, or that it was never about anything. We the living do not know what it is all about, and if the curtain doesn't rise at the hour of death, no one will ever know. Or at least no mortal will ever know. How strange that would be! Could it be like that?
It could be in the sense that it is epistemically possible, that is, possible for all we can legitimately claim to know. I am using 'know' in that strict and serious way according to which knowledge entails objective certainty. What I know sensu stricto I know without the possibility of mistake. But people are lazy and sloppy and claim to know all sorts of things that "just ain't so" (Ronald Reagan) when in fact that don't know 'jack' or 'squat' or 'diddly squat.'
No doubt many believe both that life has a meaning, point, purpose, and what that meaning is. But belief is not knowledge. People believe the damnedest things. (A sizable number of leftists believe that one can change one's sex and race, that math is racist, and that Trump is Hitler.) Corollary to belief's not being knowledge is the fact that conviction is no guarantee of truth.
The most one can attain in this life is a reasoned belief and a reasoned conviction. And most don't even get that far. (My meta-claim of course applies to itself: I do not claim to know, sensu stricto, that it is true. I claim merely that it is reasonably believed.)
Can we reason our way forward here? Note first that Mr. Natural's claim is just that, a claim. He is merely opining, and indeed blustering. What the hell does he know, or Ron Crumb, his creator?
You cannot prove that life has an ultimate meaning that overarches the petty and proximate meanings of the quotidian round. But you are within your epistemic rights in believing it, assuming you do so reasonably and responsibly. And so I revert to what I have said many times before, namely, that in the end we must decide what we will believe and how we will live. For a deeper dive, see yesterday's installment.
The will comes into it. The decision is free but not arbitrary in the pejorative sense: the decision is reached after due doxastic diligence has been exercised in the evaluation of the various considerations for and against, and the decision is maintained over time by ongoing evaluation as new arguments and evidences surface. Don't confuse liberum arbitrium with random neuronal swerves.
Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, and the Will to Believe
My friend, I continue to read and reread your Heaven and Hell essay, especially the "Concluding Existential-Practical Postscript".Psalm 23. "The Lord is my Shepherd. I shall not…." Let us pray that there is a Good Shepherd who cares deeply about his flock and will do things to relieve their suffering. Can we come to believe in him with an act of will?
Surely not by an act of will alone. You didn't carefully attend to what I wrote (and to which I now add bolding):
. . . while these philosophical and theological problems are genuine and important, they cannot be resolved on the theoretical plane. In the end, after canvassing all the problems and all the arguments for and against, one simply has to decide what one will believe and how one will live. In the end, the will comes into it. The will must come into it, since nothing in this area can be proven, strictly speaking. [. . .] The will comes into it, as I like to say, because the discursive intellect entangles itself in problems it cannot unravel.
Obviously, one cannot decide what the truth is: the truth is what it is regardless of what we believe, desire, hope for, fear, etc. But one can and must decide what one will believe with respect to those propositions that are existentially important. What is true does not depend on us; what we believe does (within certain limits of course: it would be foolish to endorse doxastic voluntarism across the board.)
You have read Sextus Empiricus and know something about Pyrrhonian skepticism. You know that, with respect to many issues, the arguments on either side, pro et con, 'cancel out' and leave one in a state of doxastic equipoise. In many of these situations, the rational course is to suspend judgment by neither affirming nor denying the proposition at issue, especially when the issues are contention-inspiring and likely to lead to bitter controversy and bloodshed. But not in all situations, or so say I against Sextus. One ought not in all situations of doxastic equipoise suspend judgment. For there are some issues that are existentially important. (One of them, of course, is whether we have a higher destiny attainment of which depends on how we comport ourselves here and now.) With respect to these existentially important issues, one ought not seek the ataraxia (imperturbableness) that supposedly, according to Sextus, comes from living adoxastos (belieflessly). To do so might be theoretically rational, but not practically rational. It would be theoretically rational, but only if we were mere transcendental spectators of the passing scene as opposed to situated spectators embroiled in it. We are embedded in the push and shove of this fluxed-up causal order and not mere observers of it. We have what Wilhelm Dilthey calls a Sitz im Leben.
As I like to put it, we are not merely spectators of life's parade; we also march in it. (A mere spectator of a parade may not care where it is headed; but if you are marching in it, swept up in it, you'd damned well better care where it is headed.)
Suppose in order to have a decent day physically I need to begin it with a 10 K run. Well, most or at least many days I can make myself run. But on some days my legs just will not. Pain and fatigue are the obstacles. Suppose to have a decent "inner" day I also need to begin it with believing in and trusting in our Good Shepherd. Some days, yes, but many days, I fear, I will not or cannot . Too much pain (before the meds) and too much exhaustion with the world.
I said, "In the end . . . one simply has to decide what one will believe and how one will live." I now add that, having made that decision after due consideration, one has to stick with it. You seem to think that belief and trust need to be generated each day anew. I say instead that they do not: you already made the commitment to believe and trust; what you do each day is re-affirm it. It's a standing commitment. Standing commitments transcend the moment and the doubts of the moment. And of course doubts there will be. One ought to avoid the mistake of letting a lesser moment, a moment of doubt or weakness or temptation, undo the commitment made in a higher moment, one of existential clarity.
It's like a marital vow. After due deliberation you decided to commit yourself to one person, from that moment forward, in sickness and in health, through good times and bad, 'til death do you part. You know what that means: no sexual intercourse with anyone else for the rest of your days; if she gets sick you will nurse her; if you have to deplete your savings to cover her medical expenses, you will do so, etc. You may be sorely tempted to make a move on your neighbor's wife, and dump your own when she is physically shot and you must play the nurse. That is where the vows come in and the moral test comes.
Inserting a benevolent Creator in this world I encounter is VERY difficult.
I agree that it is VERY difficult at times to believe that this world is the creation of an omni-qualified providential God, a 'Father' who lovingly foresees and provides for his 'children.' Why then did he not lift a finger to help his Chosen People who were worked to death and slaughtered in the Vernichtungslagern of the Third Reich? And so on, and so forth. Nothing new here. It's the old problem of evil. You can of course argue reasonably from the fact of evil to the nonexistence of God. But you can also argue reasonably from the fact of evil to the existence of God, and in more than one way. The 'Holocaust argument' is one way.
This brings me back to my main point: in the end, you will have to decide what to believe and how to live. The will comes into it.
Maybe I've misunderstood you. I see "will" as a weak and unreliable route to a good life, much less salvation.
I disagree. While I don't agree with Nietzsche, for whom "The will is the great redeemer," 0ne of the sources, I would guess, of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph des Willens, I see will as the only way to offset the infirmity of reason, which I imagine you must have some sympathy with given your appreciation for the Pyrrhonistas. In the controversy between Leibniz and Pierre Bayle, I side with Bayle. Reason is weak, though not so weak as to be incapable of gauging its own weakness. We embedded spectators must act, action requires decision and de-cision — a cutting off of ratiocination — is will-driven
You see why I wonder whether we are not already in Hell. Where I have gone wrong?
You cannot seriously mean that we are in hell now. That makes as little sense as to say that we are in heaven now. "Words mean things," as Rush Limbaugh used to say in his flat-footed way, and in a serious discussion, I expect you will agree that one must define one's terms. The 'Jebbies' (Jesuits) got hold of you at an impressionable age, and you became, as you told me, a star altar boy. You've had a good education, you know Latin and Greek, and went on to get a doctorate in philosophy in the U.K.
So you must know that what 'hell' means theologically is “[the] state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed.” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 1033.) To be in hell is to be in a state that is wholly evil and from which there is no exit. Now is this world as we experience it wholly evil? Of course not. Neither it is wholly good.
It simply makes no sense, on any responsible use of terms, to describe this life, hic et nunc, as either heaven or hell. If you want to tag it theologically, the appropriate term would be 'purgatory.' As I wrote earlier,
. . . it is reasonably held that we are right now in purgatory. The case is made brilliantly and with vast erudition by Geddes MacGregor in Reincarnation in Christianity (Quest Books, 1978, see in particular, ch. 10, "Reincarnation as Purgatory."
The Universe Groks Itself and the Aporetics of Artificial Intelligence
I will cite a couple of articles for you to ponder. Malcolm Pollack sends us to one in which scientists find their need for meaning satisfied by their cosmological inquiries. Subtitle: “The stars made our minds, and now our minds look back.”
The idea is that in the 14 billion years since the Big Bang, the universe has become aware of itself in us. The big bad dualisms of Mind and Matter, Subject and Object are biting the dust. We belong here in the material universe. We are its eyes. Our origin in star matter is higher origin enough to satisfy the needs of the spirit.
Malcolm sounds an appropriately skeptical note: "Grist for the mill – scientists yearning for spiritual comfort and doing the best their religion allows: waking up on third base and thinking they've hit a triple." A brilliant quip.
Another friend of mine, nearing the end of the sublunary trail, beset by maladies physical and spiritual, tells me that we are in Hell here and now. He exaggerates, no doubt, but as far as evaluations of our predicament go, it is closer to the truth than a scientistic optimism blind to the horrors of this life. What do you say when nature puts your eyes out, or when dementia does a Biden on your brain, or nature has you by the balls in the torture chamber?
What must it be like to be a "refuge on the unarmed road of flight" after Russian missiles have destroyed your town and killed your family?
Does the cosmos come to self-awareness in us? If it does, then perhaps it ought to figure out a way to restore itself to the nonbeing whence it sprang.
The other article to ponder, Two Paths for A.I. (The New Yorker), offers pessimistic and optimistic predictions about advanced AI.
If the AI pessimists are right, then it is bad news for the nature-mystical science optimists featured in the first article: in a few years, our advanced technology, self-replicating and recursively self-improving, may well restore the cosmos to (epistemic) darkness, though not to non-being.
I am operating with a double-barreled assumption: mind and meaning cannot emerge from the wetware of brains or from the hardware of computers. You can no more get mind and meaning from matter than blood from a stone. Mind and Meaning have a Higher Origin. Can I prove it? No. Can you disprove it? No. But you can reasonably believe it, and I'd say you are better off believing it than not believing it. The will comes into it. (That's becoming a signature phrase of mine.) Pragmatics comes into it. The will to believe.
And it doesn't matter how complexly organized the hunk of matter is. Metabasis eis allo genos? No way, Matty.
Theme music: Third Stone from the Sun.
Worldly Success and Spiritual Growth
Worldly success can easily ensnare, and most will fall into the trap. But for some, worldly success has the opposite effect: it reveals the vanity, the emptiness, of worldly success, and thus subserves spiritual advance. One is therefore well-advised to strive for a modicum of success as defined in the worldly terms of property and pelf, name and fame, status and standing, love and sex, the pleasures of the flesh.
The successful are in a position to see through the goods of this life, having tasted them; the failures are denied this advantage, and may persist in the belief that if only they could get their hands on some property and pelf, etc. then they would achieve the ultimate in happiness.
A corollary is that a young person should not be too quick to renounce the world. Experience it first to appreciate the reasons for renunciation. Contemptus mundi is best acquired by mundane experience, not by reading books about it or following the examples of others. Better a taste of the tender trap before joining the Trappists. (Have I spoiled this little homily with the concluding cleverness?)
Michael Walzer on Religion
At least one lefty gets it, somewhat. Top o' the Stack.
A Love of Life Inordinate and Idolatrous?
The case of Susan Sontag.
Top o' the Stack.
The Greatest Temptation
A Love of Life Inordinate and Idolatrous?
Dying of cancer, Susan Sontag raged against the dying of the light, hoping for a cure. "If only my mother hadn't hoped so much." (David Rieff, Swimming in a Sea of Death, Simon and Shuster, 2008, 139.) Hers was a false hope, one fueled by an inordinate and idolatrous love of life: ". . . my mother could not get enough of being alive, she reveled in being; it was as straightforward as that." (143) But this being was the being of a sick mortal human animal soon slated for destruction. And so the question arises: is an attitude toward life like that of Sontag excessive and idolatrous? Is it not absurd to attach an absolute value to something so transient and miserable?
There are inordinate loves in this life — of wine and travel, loot and land — and there is the inordinate love of life itself, this life, mortal life, life that ends utterly with the death of the body after a short span of years. That is the case of Susan Sontag, secularist. Convinced that this is it, she had no belief in a life beyond this mortal life.
The horrors of this world strike many as an argument against its value, and in the case of such anti-natalists as David Benatar, the horrors speak against the morality of human procreation. But the horrendous evils of this life did nothing to dampen Sontag's vital enthusiasm. "She thought the world a charnel house . . . and couldn't get enough of it. ". . . my mother simply could not get her fill of the world." (149) She thought herself unhappy . . . and wanted to live, unhappy, for as long as she possibly could." (147) And ". . . how profoundly she had been unhappy."
She lived in and for the future because she was unhappy in the present. ". . . my sense is that she had always lived in the future . . . and yet surely the only way to even remotely come to terms with death is to live in the present." (19-20) Sontag couldn't be here now and abide in the present. She lived for a future that must, she believed, lead in a short time to her extinction.
Was Sontag's attitude toward and valuation of life reasonable? You might retort that reason doesn't come into it: the love of life is irrational! Yet Sontag was science-based and had utter contempt for the false hopes and cancer 'cures' peddled by her New Age friends. Secular to the core, religion for her was but a tissue of superstitions. She was too rational for religion but not so rational as to see the absurdity of attaching an infinite value to her miserable life.
Rieff quotes Marguerite Duras: "I cannot reconcile myself to being nothing." And then he quotes his mother: "Death is unbearable unless you can get beyond the 'I'." "But she who could do so many things in her life could never do that." Rieff thinks his mother "the very incarnation of hope." (167)
I'd say her hope was a false hope, false because baseless and irrational. An absurd hope, absurd because an unquenchable love of life cannot be satisfied in a charnel house. It is perfectly plain that a mortal man, mortal because material, cannot live forever in a material world. It would be more reasonable to take one's unquenchable love of life as pointing to a fulfillment beyond this life. Why would we have this unquenchable love if we were not made for eternal life? This non-rhetorical question can be cast as an argument, not that it would be rationally coercive; it would, however, properly deployed, render rationally acceptable the belief in and hope for eternal life.
But Sontag couldn't bring herself to believe in eternal life. So she should have made friends with finitude and dismissed her excessive love of life as delusional and idolatrous.
One of the questions that arise is whether an atheist can be an idolater. I answer in the affirmative over at Substack.
Anti-Natalism Article of Mine Now in Print and Online
Vallicella, William F.. "Is the Quality of Life Objectively Evaluable on Naturalism?" Perichoresis, vol.21, no.1, 2023, pp.70-83. https://doi.org/10.2478/perc-2023-0005
Abstract
This article examines one of the sources of David Benatar’s anti-natalism. This is the view that ‘all procreation is [morally] wrong.’ (Benatar and Wasserman, 2015:12) One of its sources is the claim that each of our lives is objectively bad, hence bad whether we think so or not. The question I will pose is whether the constraints of metaphysical naturalism allow for an objective devaluation of human life sufficiently negative to justify anti-natalism. My thesis is that metaphysical naturalism does not have the resources to support such a negative evaluation. Metaphysical naturalism is the view that causal reality is exhausted by nature, the space-time system and its contents.
The gist of my argument is that the ideal standards relative to which our lives are supposed to be axiologically substandard cannot be merely subjective expressions of our desires and aversions; they must be (i) objectively binding standards that are (ii) objectively possible in the sense of concretely realizable. The realizability condition, however, cannot be satisfied on metaphysical naturalism; ergo, failure to meet these ideal standards cannot show that our lives are objectively bad.
Keywords
- anti-natalism
- procreation
- naturalism
- metaphysical naturalism
- human life
The entire issue is available here.
The Question of the Meaning of Life
A Substack upload that clarifies the question.
A Minor Correction Anent ‘Absurd’ with a Little Help from Mark Rothko
In a Substack entry I distinguished four senses of 'absurd,' the logico-mathematical, the semantic, the existential, and the ordinary. About the existential sense I had this to say:
3) Existential. The absurd as the existentially meaningless, the groundless, the brute-factual, the intrinsically unintelligible. The absurdity of existence in this sense of 'absurd' is what elicited Jean-Paul Sartre's and his character Roquentin's nausea. The sheer, meaningless, disgusting, facticity of the chestnut tree referenced in the eponymous novel, for example, was described by Sartre as de trop and as an unintelligible excrescence.
That's pretty good, but it leaves out an important nuance. In "A Case in Reason for God's Existence?" Joseph Donceel, S. J. points out that it is not enough for a thing to count as absurd in what I am calling the existential sense that it be meaningless or unintelligible. For the absurd is not simply that which makes no sense; it is that which makes no sense, but ought to, or is supposed to. To say that life is absurd is not merely to say that it has no point or purpose; it is to say that it fails to meet a deep and universal demand or expectation on our part that it have a point or purpose. Donceel:
No one calls decorative painting absurd, but many people feel that most modern painting is absurd, because they expect it to make sense for them, and it does not. We understand what is meant when people say of reality or of life that it does not make sense. But their claim that it is absurd implies that it should make sense, that they expect it to make sense. (God Knowable and Unknowable, ed. Roth, Fordham UP, 1973, p. 181.)
The decadent 'art' of Mark Rothko et al., which is presumably intended to be art and not mere wall decoration or ornamentation meant to add a splash of color to an otherwise drab room, reflects the absurdist sensibility of the post-modern era. Healthy folk — as opposed to neurotic 'transgressive' NYC hipsters — find it absurd because it defeats their expectation that art should 'mean something' not just in the sense of representing something, but in the sense of representing something that inspires and uplifts and is beautiful in the Platonic sense that brackets (encompasses) the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.
At the opposite end of the spectrum there is kitsch, the king of which is Thomas Kinkade. Bang on the hyperlink to see samples of his work. I am not for kitsch, but I will take it over the decadent stuff. It is less fraying of the fabric of civilization. At the present time, the anti-civilizational forces are on the march and in dire need of stiff-necked opposition. But now I am straying into aesthetics about which I know little. But that doesn't stop me since, as you know, one of my mottoes is:
Nescio, ergo blogo.
First Thought of the Day
Life is a task; the world is a proving ground. First thought, best thought.
Sunday Morning Sermon: A Life Well Lived
To make good use of your time in this world, think of your life above all as a quest, a seeking, a searching, a striving. For what? For the ultimate in reality, truth, value, and for their existential appropriation.
One appropriates reality by being authentic, truth by being truthful, values and norms by living them.
It may all be absurd in the end, a "tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." But one cannot live well on the assumption that it is.
So assume that it is not and seek the truth along all avenues of advance.
The View from Mount Zappfe
Substack latest.