David Benatar, The Human Predicament, Chapter 2, Meaning

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.

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Don’t Surrender to the Left on Language

The Left's destructiveness extends even unto language. Shoot back against the linguistic hijackers. Here's some ammo from Peter Kreeft's Socratic Logic, 3rd ed., p. 36, n. 1:

The use of the traditional inclusive generic pronoun "he" is a decision of language, not of gender justice. There are only six alternatives. (1) We could use the grammatically misleading and numerically incorrect "they." But when we say "one baby was healthier than the others because they didn't drink that milk," we do not know whether the antecedent of "they" is "one" or "others," so we don't know whether to give or take away the milk. Such language codes could be dangerous to baby's health. (2) Another alternative is the politically intrusive "in-your-face" generic "she," which I would probably use if I were an angry, politically intrusive, in-your-face woman, but I am not any of those things. (3) Changing "he" to "he or she" refutes itself in such comically clumsy and ugly revisions as the following: "What does it profit a man or woman if he or she gains the whole world but loses his or her own soul? Or what shall a man or woman give in exchange for his or her soul?" The answer is: he or she will give up his or her linguistic sanity. (4) We could also be both intrusive and clumsy by saying "she or he." (5) Or we could use the neuter "it," which is both dehumanizing and inaccurate. (6) Or we could combine all the linguistic garbage together and use "she or he or it," which, abbreviated, would sound like "sh . . . it." I believe in the equal intelligence and value of women, but not in the intelligence or value of "political correctness," linguistic ugliness, grammatical inaccuracy, conceptual confusion, or dehumanizing pronouns.
 
What a sexist Neanderthal this Kreeft fellow is!  Send him to a re-education camp!

Higher Education or Higher Enstupidation?

In case you haven't yet had your fill of academic insanity, take a gander at Heather MacDonald's Higher Ed's Latest Taboo is 'Bourgeois Norms.'

Apparently, such norms are white-supremacist, misogynistic, and homophobic.  And what norms might these be? Why, "hard work, self-discipline, marriage and respect for authority."

Apparently you are a 'racist' if you advise blacks to "Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. . . . Eschew substance abuse and crime."

As stupid as this is, it perhaps gives us a clue as to the 'liberal' criterion of racism: Something is racist if it is something blacks can't do. So deferring gratification, working hard, saving and investing, refraining from looting, showing respect for legitimate authority are all racist because blacks as a group have a hard time doing these things.

To promote and recommend these life-enhancing values and norms is to 'dis' their 'culture.'  After all, all cultures are equally good, equally conducive to human flourishing, right?

Are these the implications here?  I'm just asking. I am trying to understand. I am trying to get into the liberal head. So far it seems like diving into a bucket of shit. Or am I being unfair?  Am I missing something?

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Abdication of Authority by University Admins? Or Something Worse?

Just over the transom by someone  in the trenches of academe:

I wonder if it's true as you say that "the authorities abdicate." When I read things like this — they seem to come up about once a week now, or once a day — I don't think there are authorities just abdicating.  No, it looks much more like the authorities are fully on board with whatever new moronic and evil thing the leftists want to do.  They seem to be using their authority to legitimate and promote everything sick and evil, from transgenderist ideology to open violent hatred of white people.  They stop just short of explicitly saying that these things are true and mandatory, because (I assume) they want some veil of plausible deniability.  But I don't think they're abdicating anything.  I think the situation is even worse than you think it is.  If only they were just lazy or incompetent or weak. 

It may well be worse than I think it is. You are closer to the action than I am. 

First the word. Apart from monarchical applications, to abdicate is to fail to fulfill a responsibility or duty.  

My line has been the following. The  university administrators and faculty who tolerate the shouting down of conservative speakers, the rescinding of invitations to speak, attacks on people and property, and the rest of Antifa-type barbarism, are essentially cowards who love their high salaries, perquisites, and privileges. They are mostly unprincipled careerists who bend whichever way the wind blows. They are not, in the main, out to destroy the universities; they simply lack the courage to take a stand in defense of the traditional values of the university and accept the consequences of so doing. They fear being called 'racists' and the rest of the names.  They are squishy liberals who hope the storm passes leaving them well-ensconced in their capacious and well-appointed offices.  They understand that the Left eats its own and that if they make common cause with the destructive elements, they too may be destroyed in good old commie fashion.

To sum up your view: What is going on is not abdication of authority, but misuse of authority.  I am willing to change my view, but I will need some solid evidence. You need to name names. 

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Academic Insanity at Boise State

The authorities abdicate and the collapse of the universities continues apace. Another example:

At Boise State University, in deep-red Idaho, a group of students is demanding that the university fire political scientist Scott Yenor for his scholarship on the intellectual history of feminism and the transgender movement. Even worse, some administrators are piling on.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: The Brown-Eyed Girls

Judy Collins, Cravings: How I Conquered Food, Doubleday 2017, pp. 112-113:

. . . and writing Albert Grossmann that no, I did not want to join a trio of women he was bent on calling the Brown-Eyed Girls. He had put Peter, Paul and Mary together, telling me that I was the fallback choice if Mary hadn't worked out. Albert saw how I was struggling and didn't think I could make it on my own, hence the trio idea. It was to be me, Judy Henske and Jo Mapes. He told me he would get me brown contacts, his idea of a joke — Henske had brown eyes and Mapes and I would have to get brown contacts. I had agreed hastily — after all, he had made Peter, Paul and Mary into an international franchise. Now I changed my yes to a no. I would go it on my own, no matter what. I was going to do it my way or die trying.

Way to go, Judy. You pulled it off and beat your addictions as well.

Judy Collins, Both Sides Now.  Wonderful. My favorite version, however, is that of Dave van Ronk and the Hudson Dusters.

Judy Collins, Someday Soon

Judy Collins, Amazing Grace

Judy Henske, High Flying Bird

Judy Henske, Any Day Now

Judy Henske, Till the Real Thing Comes Along

Jo Mapes, You Were on My Mind. Beautiful, but takes a little getting used to if you are coming at it from the We Five hit version. Ian Sylvia have a great version. 

Jo Mapes, No One to Talk My Troubles To 

Scientism, Underbelief, and Overbelief

The secular nail their colors to the mast of scientism.  Or most of them do.  Their attitude is an amalgam of underbelief and overbelief.  Their underbelief is their belief that science alone is genuine knowledge.  Their overbelief is that this is so – – when it is plain that it is not something known scientifically.

There is so much that we know that we do not know by means of the natural sciences. Some examples for you to think about.

  1. There is logical knowledge.  How do you know that the A and O forms of the traditional square of opposition are convertible while the E and O forms are not? By empirical observation and experiment?
  2. There is mathematical knowledge.
  3. There is semantic knowledge.
  4. There is moral knowledge.
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The Paradox of the Misanthropic Naturalist Animal Lover

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, man and man alone among living things has a higher origin and a higher destiny. Made in the image and likeness of God, and the only creature so made, he comes from God and is called to return to God for his ultimate felicity and fulfillment. He is, to be sure, an animal, but one called to theosis and thus an animal qualitatively different from every other type of animal. 

In that now languishing tradition, man had a calling, a vocation.

But God is dead, culturally speaking, at least among the the elites of the West, and since 1859 the qualitative superiority of the human animal is no longer much believed in. Man is back among the animals, 'in series' with them, just another product of evolution, whose origin is measly and whose destiny is extinction.  Man on a naturalist construal is at best quantitatively superior to his non-human progenitors.

Now consider a naturalist about the human species who is also a misanthrope and an animal lover. He hates man while loving animals even though he holds that man is just an animal. He hates man because he is destroying the earth and the flora and fauna upon it.

There is something paradoxically selective about our naturalist's misanthropic love of animals. He is out to save the whales but doesn't give a rat's ass about prenatal human animals . . . . He loves animals except for the species of animal of which he is a specimen.

The misanthropy goes together with nature idolatry.

Unable to worship God, and unable to appreciate man's greatness, he makes a god of nature and its irrational beasts.

You may recall the case of  Timothy Treadwell, who camped among grizzlies, and whose luck ran out. 

In an Outside article, the author, Doug Peacock, reports that Treadwell "told people he would be honored to 'end up in bear scat.'" And in his last letter, Treadwell refers to the grizzly as a "perfect animal." There are here the unmistakable signs of nature idolatry. Man must worship something, and if God be denied, then an idol must take his place, whether it be nature with its flora and fauna, or money, or sex, or the Revolution, or  some other 'icon.'

Deny God, devalue man, and end up bear shit. Way to go 'man.' 

Sympathy for Hillary

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.

Strawson’s Vacuous Materialism

Jacques and Malcolm are currently fired up and doing battle over qualia. To stoke the fire further, here is post from a couple of years ago, from 15 September 2015, to be exact.  It strikes me as beautifully written, rigorous, and true.  (Surprise!)

……………….

In Does Matter Think? I wrote:

. . . I don't dogmatically claim that matter could not have occult or hidden powers.  Maybe the meat between my ears does have the power to think.  But then that meat is not matter in any sense we currently understand.  And that is my point.  You can posit occult powers if you like, and pin your hopes on a future science that will lay them bare; but then you are going well beyond the empirical evidence and engaging in high-flying speculations . . . .

I now add that I am using 'thinking' in the broad Cartesian sense that covers all intentional or object-directed experiences; but I also hold that non-intentional experiences are unintelligible to us on the basis of current physics.  My thesis is that, given what we know about the physical world from current physics, it it unintelligible that the phenomena of mind, whether intentional or non-intentional, be wholly material in nature.

I grant that what is unintelligible to us might nevertheless be the case.  But if such-and-such is unintelligible to us, then that is a fairly good reason to believe that it is not possibly the case.  A theological example may help clarify the dialectical situation.  Christians believe that God became man.  Some will say that this is impossible in the strongest possible sense: logically impossible, i.e., in contravention of the Law of Non-Contradiction.  For what the doctrine implies is that one person has both human and divine attributes, that one person is both passible and impassible, omniscient and non-omnisicent, etc.  One response, a mysterian response, is to say that the doctrine of the Incarnation is true, and that therefore it is logically possible.  The fact, if it is fact, that the Incarnation is unintelligible to us — where 'unintelligible' means: not understandable as possibly true in a broadly logical sense –  does not show that the doctrine is impossible, but that it is a mystery: a true proposition that we, due to our limitations, cannot understand.

A materialist can make the same sort of move in one of two ways.  He could say that our understanding of matter at present does not allow us to understand how conscious experience could be wholly material in nature, or he can say that our understanding of matter will never allow us to understand how conscious experience could be wholly material in nature.  Either way, conscious experience, whether intentional or non-intentional, is wholly material in nature, and falls entirely within the subject-matter of physics, whether a future physics achievable by us, or a physics which, though not achievable by us, is perhaps achievable by organisms of a different constitution who study us.

If I understand Galen Strawson's view, it is the first.  Conscious experience is fully real but wholly material in nature despite the fact that on current physics we cannot account for its reality: we cannot understand how it is possible.   Here is a characteristic passage from Strawson: 

Serious materialists have to be outright realists about the experiential. So they are obliged to hold that experiential phenomena just are physical phenomena, although current physics cannot account for them.  As an acting materialist, I accept this, and assume that experiential phenomena are "based in" or "realized in" the brain (to stick to the human case).  But this assumption does not solve any problems for materialists.  Instead it obliges them to admit ignorance of the nature of the physical, to admit that they don't have a fully adequate idea of what the physical is, and hence of what the brain is.  ("The Experiential and the Non-Experiential" in Warner and Szubka, p. 77)

Strawson and I agree on two important points.  One is that what he calls experiential phenomena are as real as anything and cannot be eliminated or reduced to anything non-experiential.  The other is that there is no accounting for experiential items in terms of current physics.

In the Comments, Vlastimil V. asked:

But, what exactly, according to you, is matter in the sense we currently understand? And does matter so conceived really exclude, a priori, that it thinks? About this the physicalist would love to hear more details.

It is matter as understood by current physics.  And yes, one can know a priori that matter so conceived cannot think or feel. Note that I am not saying that matter anyhow conceived can be known a priori to be such that it cannot think or feel.  I admit the very vague, very abstract, epistemic  (and perhaps only epistemic) possibility that God or some super-intelligent extraterrestrial or even human being far in the future could get to the point of understanding how an experiential item like a twinge of pain could be purely material or purely physical.  But this is really nothing more than an empty gesturing towards a 'possibility' that cannot be described except in the vaguest terms.  It is nothing but faith, hope, and hand-waving. 

An experiential item such as a twinge of pain or a rush of elation is essentially subjective; it is something whose appearing just is its reality.  For qualia, esse = percipi.  If I am told that someday items like this will be exhaustively understood from a third-person point of view as objects of physics, I have no idea what this means.  The notion strikes me as absurd.  We are being told in effect that what is essentially subjective will one day be exhaustively understood as both essentially subjective and wholly objective.  If you tell me that understanding in physics need not be objectifying understanding, I don't know what that means either.

As Strawson clearly appreciates, one cannot reduce a twinge of pain to a pattern of neuron firings, for such a reduction eliminates the what-it-is-like-ness  of the experience.  And so he inflates the concept of the physical to cover both the physical and the irreducibly mental.  But by doing this he drains the physical of definite meaning.  His materialism is a vacuous materialism.

Strawson frankly confesses, "I am by faith a materialist." (p. 69)  Given this faith, experiential items, precisely as experiential, must be wholly material in nature.  This faith engenders the hope that future science will unlock the secret.  Strawson must pin his hope on future science because of his clear recognition that experiential items are incomprehensible in terms of current physics.

But what do faith and hope have to do with sober inquiry?  It doesn't strike me as particularly  intellectually honest to insist that materialism just has to be true and to uphold it by widening the concept of the physical to embrace what is irreducibly mental.  It would be more honest just to admit that the mind-body problem is insoluble.

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