John G. Messerly's Blog, page 31

Does The USA Desperately Needs Immigrants?

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A friend recently shared, “As We Live Longer, How Should Life Change? There Is a Blueprint.” The article investigates how we will have to reimagine education, careers, cities, and life transitions for lives that span a century (or more). I’d like to consider just one issue that arises in the article—the fact that the population in the USA  is aging and its birthrate continues to decline. (The same is true in other wealthy countries too.)

One result of these demographic trends is that social security is now expected to be unable to pay full benefits by 2033, as there are fewer young working people paying the tax for older Americans.

(Of course, if we raised the Social Security tax limit, which is the maximum amount of earnings subject to Social Security tax, the system would be awash in money. Currently, the Social Security taxable maximum is $142,800 in 2021. Workers pay a 6.2% Social Security tax on their earnings until they reach $142,800 in earnings for the year. Yes, that means that Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, etc. legally have to pay less than $10,000 a year of social security taxes on their salaries; the same as someone making 142K.)

Now let me begin with a serious caveat. I’m a philosopher and not an economist, political scientist, or immigration expert. I learned long ago not to venture beyond my field of expertise and think that because I’m an expert in one field I also have expertise in another.

Yes, I can read about Covid but that doesn’t make me a world-class immunologist like Tony Fauci. (I don’t have the necessary background in the natural sciences to understand viruses at the molecular level.) Yes, I can read about relativity theory and quantum mechanics but that doesn’t make me Sean Carroll. (I don’t have the necessary background in the mathematical sciences to even begin to rival a physicist’s understanding.) Yes, I read parts of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations in a grad school seminar (as well as Milton Friedman, F.A. Hayek, and other neo-Austrian economists) but none of this makes me Paul Krugman or Joseph E. Stiglitz or Thomas Piketty. (Again, it took them a lifetime to acquire their expertise.) And I simply don’t want to fall prey to the Dunning-Kruger effect.

But with those caveats out of the way, my best guess is that the USA needs to mimic  Canada which recognizes they must vastly Increase immigration to make up for an aging population. (Their goal is to triple the size of their population by the end of the century.) I’d surmise that the USA also needs to vastly increase immigration so we have some young hardworking people to pay into social security.

Moreover, it is well-documented that immigrants are 80% more likely to start a business than those born in the U.S., and that the number of jobs created by these immigrant-founded firms is 42% higher than native-born founded firms, relative to each population.

To put it simply, it seems crazy when you have young people arriving at your borders and saying “I want to be on your team” and you reply, “no we don’t want you on our team.” They arrive willing to work and there is so much work to be done.  What good does it do us to not have strawberries picked or rooms cleaned or highways repaired? What good does it do us not to have more engineers or computer scientists or physicians? (And yes, I am well-aware of Garrett Hardin’s notions of the “tragedy of the commons” and “lifeboat ethics.”)

However, I’m a fallibilist; I could be all wrong about this. And I apologize for venturing beyond my field of expertise. This was meant as food for thought.

Philosophy Study Guides – by Professor Laurence Houlgate

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I recently discovered several superb, low-cost study guides on the classics of philosophy. They are authored by Laurence Houlgate, Ph.D., who is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy
at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo where he was a beloved colleague and teacher. He wrote the guides after his retirement in order to keep a promise to his former students.

I have read parts of all of the study guides and the voice of a good teacher and scholar can be heard on every page. I highly recommend them. Just click on the picture to be taken to one of the low-cost guides. (Also, Professor Houlgate has a great philosophy blog.)

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Finally, let me say that the modern philosophers above are some of my favorite thinkers in the Western tradition. Well worth becoming acquainted with them if you are not already.

Do We Matter in the Cosmos?

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The Hubble Ultra-Deep Field image shows some of the most remote galaxies visible with present technology, each consisting of billions of stars (the image’s area of sky is very small – equivalent in size to one-tenth of a full moon)[1]

Nick Hughes is a postdoctoral research fellow at University College Dublin. His essay,“Do we matter in the cosmos?” begins by placing humanity  in our true temporal and spatial perspective:

Travelling at the speed of light—671 million miles per hour—it would take us 100,000 years to cross the Milky Way. But we still wouldn’t have gone very far. By recent estimates, the Milky Way is just one of 2 trillion galaxies in the observable Universe, and the region of space that they occupy spans at least 90 billion light-years. If you imagine Earth shrunk down to the size of a single grain of sand, and you imagine the size of that grain of sand relative to the entirety of the Sahara Desert, you are still nowhere near to comprehending how infinitesimally small a position we occupy in space …

And that’s just the spatial dimension. The observable Universe has existed for around 13.8 billion years. If we shrink that span of time down to a single year, with the Big Bang occurring at midnight on 1 January, the first Homo sapiens made an appearance at 22:24 on 31 December. It’s now 23:59:59, as it has been for the past 438 years, and at the rate we’re going it’s entirely possible that we’ll be gone before midnight strikes again. The Universe, on the other hand, might well continue existing forever …

In response to the inconceivable immensity of space and time, Hughes asks: 1) if we are so insignificant compared to the vastness of space and time, do we matter at all? and 2) if our lives are inconsequential, are despair and nihilism the proper response?

William’s Response

To answer such questions, Hughes looks to the moral philosopher Bernard Williams:

… significance from the cosmic point of view is the same thing as having objective value. Something has objective value when it is not only valuable to some person or other, but valuable independently of whether anyone judges it to be so … valuable … from a universal perspective. By contrast, something can be subjectively valuable even if it is not objectively valuable … Williams takes it to be a consequence of a naturalistic, atheistic worldview that nothing has objective value. In his posthumous essay ‘The Human Prejudice’ (2006), he argues that the only kind of value that exists is the subjective kind …

Since, according to Williams, to be significant from the cosmic point of view is to be objectively valuable, and there is no such thing as objective value, it follows that there is no such thing as cosmic significance. The very idea, he argues, is ‘a relic of a world not yet thoroughly disenchanted’. In other words, of a world that still believes in the existence of God. Once we recognise that there is no such thing, he says, there is ‘no other point of view except ours in which our activities can have or lack a significance’. The question of what is significant from the point of view of the cosmos is incoherent: one might as well ask what is significant from the point of view of a pile of rocks.

Kahane’s Response

If Williams is right, then we are cosmically insignificance by definition. But, as Oxford’s Guy Kahane argues in ‘Our Cosmic Insignificance’ (2013), “if the naturalistic worldview does indeed rule out the possibility of anything having objective value, then it would still do so if the Universe were the size of a matchbox, or came into existence only moments ago.” Thus whether anything has objective value is independent of the size or age of the universe. (Thomas Nagel argued similarly in “The Absurd,” 1971.)

Kahane thinks that those who dismiss the significance of our lives fail to recognize that significance “is the product of two things: how valuable (or disvaluable) it is, but also how worthy it is of attention.” And how worthy of attention your life is decreases as the background against which it is measured enlarges. So your life is relatively important from the point of view of your family, but less so as you consider it from the point of view of your city, country, planet and eventually the universe—from which we are surely physically and temporally insignificant.

But “significance is also a function of value” and “if the primary source of value is intelligent life, it follows that our cosmic significance depends on how much intelligent life there is out there.” If the Universe is teeming with intelligent life “then we are indeed cosmically insignificant. If, however, we are the sole exemplars of intelligent life, then we are of immense cosmic significance …”

My Response to Kahane

I’m not moved by Kahane’s argument that our cosmic significance depends on whether other intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe. There is a sense in which the species becomes more significant if we are the only intelligent beings in the universe—no other life exists with which to share significance—but that doesn’t ameliorate my worries about my life and the universe being significant. In fact, I would prefer there is intelligent life elsewhere so that, were life on earth to die, intelligent life would remain somewhere. Moreover, you could reverse Kahane’s argument and say that intelligent life becomes more significant when it is diffused throughout the universe, for then it would be more capable of affecting that universe.  

However, I agree with Kahane that the size and age of the universe are irrelevant to the question of objective value. I also agree that we aren’t significant in the sense of being worthy of attention merely given the fact of the immensity of time and space. So I do think the crux of the issue of whether we are significant has to do with values.

Hughes’ Response

Hughes begins by noting “that something can be significant while being neither valuable nor disvaluable.” For example, meteorologists “say that the formation of the body of air was significant in the chain of events that led to the storm turning into a hurricane.” But there is no value judgment here about the body of air or the hurricane unless they affect sentient life. Instead, the body of air was significant in a causal sense. It “was significant because it played an important role in the tropical storm developing into a hurricane.”

Hughes argues that “it is a sense of causal, rather than value, insignificance that is central to the sense that we are cosmically insignificant.” And that’s because “causally speaking, we really are insignificant from the point of view of the whole Universe.” However, if our causal powers were infinitely larger—if we could control galaxies or warp spacetime—then we wouldn’t feel as cosmically insignificant. Perhaps “the causal-powers explanation might also explain …some of the appeals of theism … through allegiance to a supremely powerful being [believers] are able to share in its power.”

Still, Hughes doesn’t think our lack of causal power should lead to nihilism and despair. For one thing, casual power, even if we had more of it, is merely an instrumental good. Yet what really satisfies are things that are “intrinsically valuable to us,” even if they aren’t objectively valuable. As he concludes:

the ends that matter to us, the things that we care about most—our relationships, our projects and goals, our shared experiences, social justice, the pursuit of knowledge, the creation and appreciation of art, music and literature, and the future and fate of ours and other species—do not depend to any considerable extent on our having control over a vast but largely irrelevant Universe. We might be distinctly lacking in power from the cosmic perspective, and so, in a sense, insignificant. But having such power and such significance wouldn’t make much of a difference anyway. To lament its lack and respond with despair and nihilism is merely a form of narcissism. Most of what matters to us is right here on Earth.

My Response to Hughes

Hughes is right that we don’t need to be able to control the universe to experience intrinsic goods or subjective values. Still, without some power over myself and my environment, I can’t experience any goods. So, if our species became more powerful as well as more intellectually and morally excellent, then we would be well on our way to creating a more meaningful reality. Still, I agree with Hughes that our lack of causal power, by itself, doesn’t necessarily lead to nihilism.

However, I don’t think causal insignificance is the main reason for a nihilistic view of life’s meaning. True, life might be more meaningful if we were more powerful, but I think the more pressing concern is that objective values might not exist, and subjective values might not matter.

So, do we matter in the cosmos? From sub specie aeternitatis, nothing matters. From our point of view, we somewhat matter to ourselves and those close to us, but in the end, when the universe has grown cold and dark when entropy has run its course, even our subjective values will vanish. In the end, I fear that Williams has it about right.

Still, I care about things nonetheless. I act as if my life matters. And the likelihood that my life probably doesn’t matter either objectively or subjectively doesn’t seem to change that. In the end, it seems that the fact that nothing matters doesn’t seem to matter much either.

Marrying the Wrong Person

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Alain de Botton ( 1969 – ) penned an astute essay in the New York Times titled: “Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person.” De Botton is a Swiss-born British author who co-founded The School of Life in 2008. His books discuss various contemporary subjects and themes, emphasizing philosophy’s relevance to everyday life and offering sound practical advice. His published works include: On Love: A Novel, which has sold more than two million copies, and his newest book, The Course of Love. His other books include:

How Proust Can Change Your Life [image error]
The Consolations of Philosophy
The Architecture of Happiness [image error]
Status Anxiety [image error]
The Art of Travel [image error]
Religion for Atheists: A Non-believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion [image error]
Art as Therapy [image error]
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work [image error]
How to Think More About Sex
The News: A User’s Manual
Essays In Love
A Week at the Airport [image error]

Now, why will you marry the wrong person? One reason is that we are all flawed. Were we more self-aware, the first question perspectives mates would ask each other is: “And how are you crazy?” We don’t recognize we’re all crazy because we often abandoned relationships before they get complicated or, if we live alone, we assume we’re easy to get along with. And our friends and family hesitate to tell us the truth about ourselves. Everyone is psychologically unhealthy to varying degrees. And typically people don’t spend enough time together before committing to another person to know this.

Now for most of recorded history, people married for reasons of finance, religion, politics, convenience, or their marriages were otherwise arranged. Such marriages were often disastrous and today have been replaced in most of the world with the marriage of feeling or emotion. “What matters in the marriage of feeling is that two people are drawn to each other by an overwhelming instinct and know in their hearts that it is right.” And while we think we seek happiness in marriage, we often seek something we associated with childhood—like helping a parent or being deprived of their love. And we reject potential partners because they might be “too balanced, mature, understanding and reliable—given that in our hearts, such rightness feels foreign.”

Loneliness is another cause of choosing bad partners. If remaining single is unbearable, it isn’t surprising we choose poorly. We might choose anyone just to avoid the fate of remaining single. Another reason we choose poorly is that we want to make the feeling of falling in love seem permanent, but there is “no solid connection between these feelings and the institution of marriage.” For marriage isn’t about passionate love; it is about work and strife, money and children.

Yet the good news is that “it doesn’t matter if we find we have married the wrong person.” We don’t need to abandon our spouse, just the stupid idea of Romantic love—that some perfect person exists who will satisfy all our needs. Instead, mature people recognize:

… that every human will frustrate, anger, annoy, madden and disappoint us—and we will (without any malice) do the same to them. There can be no end to our sense of emptiness and incompleteness. But none of this is unusual or grounds for divorce. Choosing whom to commit ourselves to is merely a case of identifying which particular variety of suffering we would most like to sacrifice ourselves for.

This “philosophy of pessimism … relieves the excessive imaginative pressure that our romantic culture places upon marriage.” That another person can’t save us from ourselves is not surprising, but should be expected. Still, some people are better for us than others. Who are they?

The person who is best suited to us is not the person who shares our every taste (he or she doesn’t exist), but the person who can negotiate differences in taste intelligently—the person who is good at disagreement. Rather than some notional idea of perfect complementarity, it is the capacity to tolerate differences with generosity that is the true marker of the “not overly wrong” person. Compatibility is an achievement of love; it must not be its precondition. (My emphasis.)

Loving is about learning to be more forgiving of our own and others’ faults. Love isn’t something we fall into, but something we learn to do, as Erich Fromm explained years ago.

Richard J. Blackwell Has Died

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(Some books authored by Richard Blackwell.)

I just found out that my graduate school mentor, Richard J. Blackwell, died last month. Here is an obituary with a photograph. I have kept in touch with him regularly through the years, but I hadn’t seen him in person in a long time. But the photo must have been taken about the time I was his graduate student for it is exactly as I remember him.

In a previous post, I wrote about his profound influence on my intellectual development and his extraordinary generosity as a human being. He had a hearty laugh and was so calm. When I was stressed out as a grad student I would go into his office, talk to him, and it was better than taking a Xanax! I instantly felt better.

And I still recall that handwritten letter he wrote so many years ago containing this sage advice:

As to your “what does it all mean” questions, you do not really think that I have strong clear replies when no one else since Plato has had much success! It may be more fruitful to ask about what degree of confidence one can expect from attempted answers, since too high expectations are bound to be dashed. It’s a case of Aristotle’s advice not to look for more confidence than the subject matter permits. At any rate, if I am right about there being a strong volitional factor here, why not favor an optimistic over a pessimistic attitude, which is something one can control to some degree? This is not an answer, but a way to live.

This is still some of the best advice I’ve ever received.

Now I want to tell a story that, to the best of my knowledge, I’ve never told anyone. For my dissertation, I had to translate some previous untranslated French. I got a book called French for Reading and Translation and studied it assiduously for many months. Along with my French dictionary, I then translated many passages from Jean Piaget’s Introduction to Genetic Epistemology. I turned in the relevant chapter to Professor Blackwell and waited for his response.

When we got together to discuss the chapter, Professor Blackwell told me that my translations were very poor. As best as I remember he said,

“John, it’s as if you had the book in one hand and a dictionary in the other and just substituted words.”

And I’m thinking to myself “how else would you do it?”

Then he handed me 3 or 4 hand-written pages with translations that he had done himself. (Professor Blackwell had a solid grounding in Latin and could translate in multiple languages.) I started to read them and immediately realized the quality of the translations as compared to my amateurish ones.

I then asked, “what do I do with these?” I’ll always remember his response “Just put them in there.” So Richard Blackwell’s translations ended up in my dissertation. He probably knew that given my French translations skills it would take me years to complete my dissertation.

Now I only hope that some official doesn’t find this post all these years later and take away my PhD:) But if they did it wouldn’t matter to me. It’s the love of learning that was nourished under Dr. Blackwell’s tutelage that has stayed with all the decades.

So for one final time, I would thank Professor Blackwell for his immense contribution to my education. I am lucky to have been his student and will never forget him as long as I live.

Goodbye Professor

Professor Richard J. Blackwell

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(Some books authored by Richard Blackwell.)

I just found out that my graduate school mentor, Richard J. Blackwell, died last month. Here is an obituary with a photograph. It must have been taken about the time I was his graduate student; it is exactly as I remember him.

In a previous post, I wrote about his profound influence on my intellectual development and his extraordinary generosity as a human being. I can still see that handwritten letter he wrote so many years ago which contained this sage advice:

As to your “what does it all mean” questions, you do not really think that I have strong clear replies when no one else since Plato has had much success! It may be more fruitful to ask about what degree of confidence one can expect from attempted answers, since too high expectations are bound to be dashed. It’s a case of Aristotle’s advice not to look for more confidence than the subject matter permits. At any rate, if I am right about there being a strong volitional factor here, why not favor an optimistic over a pessimistic attitude, which is something one can control to some degree? This is not an answer, but a way to live.

This is still some of the best advice I’ve ever received.

I thank Professor Blackwell for his immense contribution to my education. I am lucky to have been his student and will never forget him as long as I live.

Goodbye Professor

The Attic

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I want to alert my readers to a wonderful, upbeat blog called the attic. Here is a brief description from the blog’s author,

Sick of the news? Come rummage in The Attic to find a kinder, cooler America.  Here you’ll find common ground, not minefields. Updated weekly, The Attic features short profiles of American artists, writers, dreamers, inventors, visionaries, and more …

Time was when magazines I wrote for, Smithsonian and American Heritage, explored this space. But screens have silenced kinder, cooler Americans.  The result is a nation of shrill voices. If you are world weary, skeptical, worried about this American “experiment,” join me in The Attic.

The blog is written by Bruce Watson, a regular contributor to Smithsonian, who has also written for American Heritage, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, Nautilus, Yankee, and other publications.  His books include Freedom Summer, Sacco and Vanzetti, and Bread and Roses (Viking).  He has also written e-biographies of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. His most recent book, nominated for a Los Angeles Times Book Award, is Light: A Radiant History from Creation to the Quantum Age (Bloomsbury).

Every post on the site is written beautifully, filled with wonderful photos, tells an American story, and can be read in just a few minutes. I have read almost all of them and enjoyed every single one. Here is a small sample:

“THE WOMAN WHO WOVE THE VAXX” (about Jennifer Doudna, one of the scientists who helped create the life-saving Covid vaccines. Thank you, Dr. Doudna.)

“WALKING AMERICA WITH THE MASTER” (about Thoreau’s love of walking, one of my favorite pastimes.)

“NETWORK” — STILL MAD AS HELL” (about a great movie, and one of my favorites.)

“THE BOOK THAT LISTENED TO GIRLS” (about the voices of women which we so desperately need to hear, and a book I first read over 30 years ago.)

“THE POET AND “THE ANSWER” (about the poet Robinson Jeffers and his ruminations on how to transcend the ugliness of this world and revel in the beauty of the universe.)

Bruce’s posts create a little bit of beauty in an oftentimes depressing world. I cannot recommend them more highly.

Schopenhauer On Wisdom

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“What a man is contributes much more to his happiness than what a man has.” ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

“Health outweighs all other blessings so much that one may really say that a healthy beggar is happier than an ailing king.”~ Arthur Schopenhauer

The Wisdom of Life is a short philosophical essay by Arthur Schopenhauer which he\ explores the nature of human happiness and how we should live in order to obtain it. It is one of the six essays from the first part of his 1851 book, Parerga and Paralipomena. (Greek for “Appendices” and “Omissions”.) It was originally intended as an appendix to his philosophy, although Schopenhauer maintained that it would be comprehensible and of interest to the uninitiated. I believe he was right.

The Wisdom of Life Summary

Introduction 

Schopenhauer begins thus,

In these pages, I shall speak of The Wisdom of Life in the common meaning of the term, as the art, namely, of ordering our lives so as to obtain the greatest possible amount of pleasure and success.

Schopenhauer sees his work as adding to the study of happiness or, as the Greeks called it, eudaimonia. This may strike us as strange, given Schopenhauer’s reputation as a pessimist. (Some of his most quoted lines include, ‘life swings back and forth like a pendulum between pain and boredom,” and “life is a business that does not cover its costs.”)

But notice that in the first few paragraphs he defines the happy existence as one “which, looked at from a purely objective point of view … would be decidedly preferable to non-existence.” For Schopenhauer happiness is the temporary absence of suffering, and the best life is a semi-satisfied one which we cling to because we deem it preferable to death. His is essentially a negative theory of happiness.

Chapter I: Division of the Subject

Schopenhauer notes that in The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle had argued that a happy life consists in acquiring external goods, bodily goods, and goods of the soul. However, Schopenhauer believes that life’s possible blessing could be divided into these categories:

1. What a person is: this refers to one’s personality including their health, temperament, moral character, strength, intelligence, and education. In short, their mental and physical health.

2. What a person has: this encompasses their property and possessions. In other words, their material wealth.

3. How a person is viewed by others: this is determined largely by one’s position. In short, this refers to how others regard a person’s rank and reputation.

Chapter II: Personality or What a Person Is

Schopenhauer argues that your personality—-your physical and mental health—is the most important factor for happiness. He agrees with the Stoics that you cannot escape from your mind and body, no matter where you go. Schopenhauer writes,

What a man is, and so what he has in his own person, is always the chief thing to consider; for his individuality accompanies him always and everywhere, and gives its color to all his experience. In every kind of enjoyment, for instance, the pleasure depends principally upon the man himself.

Regarding physical health, he maintains that a healthy body is a necessary condition for a happy soul. Health doesn’t guarantee happiness, but being unhealthy will surely make you miserable. If you’re healthy you can find pleasure; but if you are unhealthy, nothing will be enjoyable. “Health then outweighs all other blessings,” writes Schopenhauer, noting that “a healthy beggar is happier than an ailing king.” (Or an old proverb states, “A healthy person has a thousand wishes, but a sick person only one—to get well.”)

Regarding mental health, the gifts of the mind are also significant in determining human happiness.  Thus you should cultivate your intellect to live a full and rich life. (As the Bible says “The life of the fool is worse than death.” Ecclesiasticus 22:11). A lively mind finds beauty and enjoyment in the most mundane of situations whereas fools see nothing of value in even the most majestic things.

An intellectual man in complete solitude has excellent entertainment in his own thoughts and fancies, while no amount of diversity or social pleasure, theaters, excursions and amusements, can ward off boredom from a dullard.

Think of it like this. You will spend the rest of your life with yourself, so in order to be happy, you must be in good physical and mental company. Thus who you are matters most when it comes to your own happiness.

Chapter III: Property, or What a Person Has

How important are money and material wealth? Schopenhauer takes the view they are (somewhat) important but not as crucial as many people think. Money has value in the sense that it buys things we need to survive and without which we would be in pain–food, clothing, and shelter. It also provides us the freedom to do certain things. However, we may also want excess gratification of the senses or unnecessary luxuries. The problem with these desires is that they are difficult to satisfy and they never come to end. As he states,

It is difficult, if not impossible, to define the limits which reason should impose on the desire for wealth; for there is no absolute or definite amount of wealth which will satisfy a man.

Or, as he says later,

A man never feels the loss of things which it never occurs to him to ask for; he is just as happy without them; whilst another, who may have a hundred times as much, feels miserable because he has not got the one thing he wants.

 To better explain this Schopenhauer turns to Epicurus who argued that our material needs can be divided into:

Natural and necessary. Food, shelter, clothing—things we need to survive.Natural, but unnecessary. Excess food, space, clothes, sex—things that go beyond what we need to survive.Unnatural and unnecessary. Artificial needs that entertain us or provide luxuries— sports cars, luxury handbags, mansions, home movie theatres, etc.

Now is he saying that happiness only consists of the bare minimum it takes to survive? No. His point is that the greater your desires and expectations are for possessions and property the harder they will be to satisfy.  Also, while wealth provides some freedom, the returns of having more and more money are marginal. Most importantly, by focusing on what we have we disregard what is more important to our happiness—what we are.

Thus who we are is by far the most important factor in our happiness. What we have is somewhat important but the continual pursuit of property and possessions decreases our happiness. As Schopenhauer writes, “A good, temperate, gentle character can be happy in needy circumstances, whilst a covetous, envious and malicious man, even if he be the richest in the world, goes miserable.”

Chapter IV: Position, or A Man’s Place in the Estimation of Others

Concerning what others think of us—our status or position—this is actually an obstacle to our happiness. As he says,

We should add very much to our happiness by a timely recognition of the simple truth that every man’s chief and real existence is in his own skin, and not in other people’s opinions; and, consequently, that the actual conditions of our personal life, —health, temperament, capacity, income, wife, children, friends, home, are a hundred times more important for our happiness than what other people are pleased to think of us…

This chapter is by far the longest in The Wisdom of Life and is divided into five sections, each dealing with different aspects of our position. We’ll briefly summarize each in turn.

a) Reputation

Schopenhauer begins

By a peculiar weakness of human nature people generally think too much about the opinion which others form of them, although the slightest reflection will show that this opinion, whatever it may be, is not in itself essential to happiness.

He explains this with two examples of men about to be hanged. The first bowed to the crowd while the second complained that he wasn’t allowed to shave beforehand. Isn’t it obvious that such concerns were ill-placed? It didn’t matter what others thought of the condemned at that moment.

His point is that an inwardly rich person pays little heed to others’ opinions. Furthermore, our hunger for others’ approval induces anxiety and is a source of vanity—both obstacles to our happiness.

b) Pride

While vanity is the desire to appreciate ourselves from the outside, pride is the direct appreciation of ourselves from the inside. As he states, pride “is an established conviction of one’s own paramount worth in some particular respect; while vanity is the desire of rousing such a conviction in others.”

Schopenhauer also says that “the cheapest sort of pride,” is national pride. Why? Because “if a man is proud of his own nation, it argues that he has no qualities of his own of which he can be proud; otherwise he would not have recourse to those which he shares with so many millions of his fellowmen.” He claims that only those who see the folly of their own nations can be considered intelligent.

c) Rank 

Rank, he says, “is a sham; its method is to exact an artificial respect, and, as a matter of fact, the whole thing is a mere farce.” Here he was thinking of being a prince, a count, or a king. In retrospect, I think most of us would agree with him on this point.

d) Honor 

Schopenhauer regards honor as a primitive characteristic of human nature. “And if people insist that honor is dearer than life itself, what they really mean is that existence and well-being are as nothing compared with other people’s opinions.”

e) Fame

According to Schopenhauer “Fame is something which must be won, honor, only something which must not be lost.” But it is hard to be famous, and it is out of our control whether we attain it. These provide good reasons not to worry about it.

Schopenhauer also thought that if you strive for a great personality then you might just become famous, even if only after you die. But if you strive for fame directly, then you won’t become a great person. And you’ll also never be happy.

Two Miscellaneous ideas

Schopenhauer believes that 1) if you can’t find happiness in solitude or 2) if you are a nationalist, then you are likely both unhappy and unintelligent.

Regarding #1 – “A high degree of intellect tends to make a man unsocial.” The idea is that social people find solitude a burden because there aren’t imaginative and thoughtful. They are bored when alone because they are boring to themselves. Thus they are unhappy when alone. On the other hand, intelligent people don’t need much company because they find their own minds enjoyable and engaging.

Regarding #2 – If you are a nationalist Schopenhauer thinks you are unintelligent, as nationalism is “the cheapest sort of pride.” Typically, nationalists are proud of their nation because they don’t have personal qualities to be proud of.  Be proud of what you are, he counsels, not of having been born in a certain place as were millions of others.

(I have some doubts about both of these claims.)

Schopenhauer’s Exceptionally Wise Counsel

In the end, Schopenhauer says that being cheerful is the primary antidote to the misery of life. Cheerfulness isn’t a positive emotion but a state of little pain, a type of contentment that doesn’t depend on external circumstances like being rich or famous.

And the surest path to happiness is to not desire much happiness. Rather, he says, find contentment in simple pleasures like reading, writing, meditation, philosophy, science, poetry, music, and culture—things don’t depend on wealth or fame. This is how to achieve some comfort in a world permeated by pain. This is wisdom.

Psychologists say a good life doesn’t have to be happy, or even meaningful

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I read with great interest a new article “Psychologists say a good life doesn’t have to be happy, or even meaningful.” It describes recent psychological research whose basic thesis is that a good life isn’t necessarily a happy or meaningful life but is best understood as a psychologically rich life. (PRL) They define happy and meaningful lives as follows:

According to Aristotlean theory, the first kind of life would be classified as “hedonic”—one based on pleasure, comfort, stability, and strong social relationships. The second is “eudaimonic,” primarily concerned with the sense of purpose and fulfillment one gets by contributing to the greater good.

While I appreciate the author’s attempt to approach the question of meaning from a
scientific perspective, especially one that focuses on psychology, I don’t believe the authors have a good understanding of  “Aristotle on the Good Life.”

First, Aristotle’s concept of eudaimonia is typically translated as “a good life” or
“well-being” or “living well. Thus he has described a good life, not a meaningful one.
Although he might have believed the two were coextensive, he never discussed this as far as I know.

Second, the authors state the PRL life is one of “interesting experiences in which novelty and/or complexity are accompanied by profound changes in perspective.” But Aristotle
included aesthetic experience, acquiring skill, displaying honor, and manifesting courage among the elements of a good life. All of these are examples of how the good life involves activities he thought were self-transformative or self-actualizing. In fact, his whole ethics is one of self-actualization.

Third, Aristotle does not explicitly focus on purpose or the greater good as far as I know. (I am relying on my memory of an in-depth study of Aristotle’s ethics over the years; if I’m mistaken perhaps a reader can let me know so I can correct my mistake.) He certainly thinks we will be fulfilled by living a good life but we do so when we actualize our potential. Consider, for example, Aristotle’s claim that contemplation is the highest good for human beings. That is a straightforward endorsement of psychological richness.

However, I am more sympathetic to some of their other claims such as their emphasis on how people open to experiences, who are politically liberal and embrace change are more likely to lead PRL. I’m also sympathetic to their suggestion that PRL may be led even if our lives are challenging. As I wrote years ago:

… a meaningful life isn’t necessarily devoid of all obstacles for many meaningful projects—developing our talents, educating our minds, raising our children—involve difficulty and disappointment. I’m not implying that suffering is good or desirable simply that it often accompanies our attempt to live meaningfully.

For example, I found great meaning in earning a Ph.D. It was one of the hardest things I ever did and yet doing so was so psychologically rich.
And I like to imagine a world where we could all lead PRL. 

Buddha and the Universe

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My article, “The Ascent of Meaning” now appears in The Moral Life: An Introductory Reader in Ethics and Literature , just published by Oxford University Press. But, as I’ll explain below, “I” didn’t write the paper.

First, here I am with Camus and Frankl, and Russell.

9. Does Life Have Meaning?
Voltaire, The Good Brahmin
Epicurus, Hedonism
Albert Camus, Life Is Absurd
Viktor Frankl, The Human Search for Meaning: Reflections on Auschwitz
* John Messerly, The Ascent of Meaning
Bertrand Russell, Reflections on Suffering
Richard Taylor, The Meaning of Life

(The * refers to commissioned for this volume.) And guess what? I replaced the Buddha! How many philosophers can say that? Move over Siddhartha.

But seriously seeing my name with people I’ve read and admired for a long time is probably the highlight of my academic career. Yes, from the point of view of the universe one little essay may be meaningless, but it is meaningful to me now. Maybe that’s enough.

What’s interesting to me is how, at first glance, your ego kicks in and you’re proud of yourself. But then you think, didn’t the Buddha warn about how ego desires cause suffering? Didn’t he argue that the self is basically an illusion?

Maybe such questions lead to a little bit of Enlightenment. After all, I didn’t write the essay. It was written jointly by my readers and my teachers and my readers’ teachers and all our teachers going back through eons of time. It was written by a universe becoming conscious for a brief moment from one portal, window, or aperture of consciousness. It came to be, not from me, but from some point of universal consciousness.

It tried to communicate all the good things about what is and what could be: truth, beauty, goodness, liberty, equality, justice, joy, love, peace, and meaning. 

So even if our work, our loves, and our lives contribute only a microscopic thread to an infinitely vast universe … who knows what effect they might have. After all, our world and the universe are but manifestations of all that happened in the past. And if even a few people find value in this small expression of the universe … then the universe did well.

My most fervent hope is that someday, somewhere, the universe will actualize its potential and all the good things, both known and unknown, will come to pass.