John G. Messerly's Blog, page 36

Sagan: Science as a Candle in the Dark

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With all the deserved hoopla over the new version of Carl Sagan’s classic TV series “Cosmos,” I wanted to call attention to his wonderful but often overlooked book: The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. It was an excellent text for my college courses in critical thinking, deftly distinguishing science from pseudo-science, and the reasonable from the unreasonable.

The tools that guide critical or skeptical thinking and thereby allowing us to detect irrationality in all its forms, he aptly calls the “baloney detection kit.” With the medieval mindset that characterizes so much of contemporary American culture today—with its stories of ghosts and angels—Sagan’s calm rationalism shines as a beacon.

But the book deeply inspires too. Sagan, one of the promoters of the SETI project and responsible for the gold record aboard the Voyager spacecraft, denounces the absurdity of belief in ET visits and alien abductions. He wasn’t interested in believing in the fanciful, but in knowing what was true. His intellectual honesty is itself inspiring, as is his belief in the power of reason and science to understand and transform our world.

The book also warns against the temptation of believing what we want to be true, rather than in what the evidence suggests. Sagan knew the truth of Francis Bacon’s claim that: “Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true.” Such sentiments lead down a dangerous road, to beliefs in demons, witches and similar superstitions. Such beliefs are not innocuous; people have been killed over them—absurd beliefs often lead to atrocities.

Science and reason are the only means that humans have to educe a little truth from reality. Sagan’s book testifies to the glory of the rational mind; it should inspire and warn us all.

At the heart of science is an essential tension between two seemingly contradictory attitudes—an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counter-intuitive they may be, and the most ruthless skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense … ~ Carl Sagan 

Orwell’s 1984

Books of My Youth

The first books I remember reading as a child were baseball biographies. Stories of baseball legends like Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, and Stan Musial. I also have a fond memory of reading a book about the favorite baseball player of my youth titled: Ken Boyer: Guardian of the Hot Corner. (Why do such trivial things make such impressions?) The first novel I remember reading was Across the Five Aprils by Irene Hunt. It was a short novel about the American civil war that I read when I was about ten years old. Amazingly, it is still on my bookshelf! In eighth grade, I remember reading  A Separate Peace[image error], and in high school, I read Charles Dicken’s Great Expectations,  Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and The Sea, George Orwell’s Animal Farm, and many others.

In college, I remember reading Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values, and I was particularly moved by Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha.
No doubt the memory of reading many other books has long since evaporated, and there are thousands of wonderful books that I’ve never read.

The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. … Power is not a means; it is an end … The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. ~ George Orwell 1984

But the novel that influenced me the most was George Orwell’s masterpiece, 1984. ( It was the Boston Public Library’s choice as the most influential book of the twentieth century.) It is the most personally transformative novel that I’ve ever read. No one who reads and understands the book remains the same. Orwell removes a curtain that hides reality behind it—a reality so different from its portrayal by the voices and images that proceed daily in front of us and which mislead and control rather than inform, thereby making a mockery of truth. In Orwell’s world The Ministry of Truth lies; The Ministry of Peace wages war; The Ministry of Love tortures. In our own society, politicians lie with impunity; the Department of Defense wages war, and the CIA and penal system torture. We live in an authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government—a near fascist state.

It is as if Orwell allows us to peer past Kant’s phenomenal world to the noumenal world—to the way things really are. To a social and political reality so bleak and barren that even love cannot thrive. In the end, the novel’s protagonists, Winston and Julia, betray each other because, contrary to what I’ve written in previous posts, love is not stronger than death, at least it is very hard for it to be in this world. (It is hard to love in a society which pits each person against others.) Here is Winston and Julia’s conversation after both have been emptied of their most noble inclination—the inclination to love another.

“I betrayed you,” she said baldly.

“I betrayed you,” he said.

She gave him another quick look of dislike.

“Sometimes,” she said, “they threaten you with something—something you can’t stand up to, can’t even think about. And then you say, ‘Don’t do it to me, do it to somebody else, do it to so-and-so.’ And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop and didn’t really mean it. But that isn’t true. At the time when it happens you do mean it. You think there’s no other way of saving yourself and you’re quite ready to save yourself that way. You want it to happen to the other person. You don’t give a damn what they suffer. All you care about is yourself.”

“All you care about is yourself,” he echoed.

“And after that, you don’t feel the same toward the other person any longer.”

“No,” he said, “you don’t feel the same.”

If Orwell is right, life is bleaker than we usually let ourselves imagine. If Orwell is right, life may be even bleaker than we can imagine. Power and the lust for it largely remove the beauty and love from the world. Orwell taught me how bad the world can be. Let’s hope it will be better someday.

Kazantzakis: “The Saviors of God”

(It is unusual for me to read a book like this, but I wanted to understand the origins of Kazantzakis’ rejection of hope. What I found therein was some of the most poetic imagery I have ever encountered. I discovered a heart longing for truth and meaning and a voice that spoke to me from beyond the grave.)

Outline
“Prologue” – Life is characterized by ascent toward immortality, and descent toward death.
“The Preparation” – Duties: 1) accept mental limits; 2) create with the heart; 3) reject hope.
“The March – We should transcend: 1) ego; 2) race; 3) humanity; and 4) the earth.
“The Vision” – The word God refers to an anti-entropic power.
“The Action” – Our struggles make this god become a reality.
“The Silence” – In the end, we merge with the abyss.

The Saviors of God: Spiritual Exercises (1923), serves as a guide to the spiritual life, and tries to explain the evolving nature of the divine. In the book’s prologue, Kazantzakis differentiates between two forces:

WE COME from a dark abyss, we end in a dark abyss, and we call the luminous interval life. As soon as we are born the return begins, at once the setting forth and the coming back; we die in every moment. Because of this many have cried out: The goal of life is death! But as soon as we are born we begin the struggle to create, to compose, to turn matter into life; we are born in every moment. Because of this many have cried out: The goal of ephemeral life is immortality! In the temporary living organism these two streams collide: (a) the ascent toward composition, toward life, toward immortality; (b) the descent toward decomposition, toward matter, toward death … It is our duty, therefore, to grasp that vision which can embrace and harmonize these two enormous, timeless, and indestructible forces, and with this vision to modulate our thinking and our action.

These considerations led Kazantzakis to enumerate three duties in the first section of the work, which he titled: “The Preparation.” The first duty refers to the mind’s power to know a reality beyond appearances.

… I do not know whether behind appearances there lives and moves a secret essence superior to me. Nor do I ask; I do not care. I … paint with a full palette a gigantic and gaudy curtain before the abyss. Do not say, ‘Draw the curtain that I may see the painting.’ The curtain is the painting.

Here are echoes of Kant’s distinction between the noumenal and phenomenal worlds. But while Kant said we can’t know the “things in themselves,” Kazantzakis says we can’t even know if there is a reality beyond appearances. He concludes that the mind must give up its desire to know the truth, assuming such a thing even exists. This leads to the first duty:

“To SEE and accept the boundaries of the human mind without vain rebellion, and in these severe limitations to work ceaselessly without protest—this is where man’s first duty lies.”

What attitude should we take toward this duty? Kazantzakis writes:

I recognize these limitations, I accept them with resignation, bravery, and love … In sudden dreadful moments a thought flashes through me: “This is all a cruel and futile game, without beginning, without end, without meaning.” But again I yoke myself swiftly to the wheels of necessity, and all the universe begins to revolve around me … Discipline is the highest of all virtues … This is how … you may determine the omnipotence of the mind amid appearances and the incapacity of the mind beyond appearances—before you set out for salvation. You may not otherwise be saved.

I hear echoes of the Stoics and Buddhists in these passages. Accept that your knowledge is limited, but remember too that a disciplined mind is free. The second duty refers to the heart’s desire to merge with reality and to deal with the anguish of the search for meaning.

I have one longing only: to grasp what is hidden behind appearances, to ferret out that mystery which brings me to birth and then kills me, to discover if behind the visible and unceasing stream of the world an invisible and immutable presence is hiding. If the mind cannot … then if only the heart could!

And what does the heart discern? “Behind all appearances, I divine a struggling essence. I want to merge with it. I feel that behind appearances this struggling essence is also striving to merge with my heart.” Now the mind and the heart battle. The mind is limited, but the heart rejects limits; it wants immortality. The mind wants the heart to “become serene, and surrender” but the heart protests: “Who plants us on this earth without asking our permission? Who uproots us from this earth without asking our permission?” The tension, between what the mind can know and what the heart wants, appears irresolvable.

Kazantzakis proceeds by illuminating the human condition with poetic imagery:

I am a weak, ephemeral creature made of mud and dream. But I feel all the powers of the universe whirling within me. Before they crush me, I want to open my eyes for a moment and to see them. I set my life no other purpose. I want to find a single justification that I may live and bear this dreadful daily spectacle of disease, of ugliness, of injustice, of death. I once set out from a dark point, the Womb, and now I proceed to another dark point, the Tomb. A power hurls me out of the dark pit and another power drags me irrevocably toward the dark pit.

As for our fellow travelers he says:

I strive to discover how to signal my companions before I die, how to give them a hand, how to spell out for them in time one complete word at least, to tell them what I think this procession is, and toward what we go. And how necessary it is for all of us together to put our steps and hearts in harmony …

And what is the meaning of it all?

… the purpose of Earth is not life, it is not man. Earth has existed without these, and it will live on without them. They are but the ephemeral sparks of its violent whirling. Let us unite, let us hold each other tightly, let us merge our hearts … so long as the warmth of this earth endures, so long as no earthquakes, cataclysms, icebergs or comets come to destroy us … let us create for Earth a brain and a heart, let us give a human meaning to the superhuman struggle. This anguish is our second duty.

The third duty derives from the failure of the mind or the heart to ultimately satisfy his thirst for meaning or god.

The moment is ripe: leave the heart and the mind behind you, go forward, take the third step. Free yourself from the simple complacency of the mind that thinks to put all things in order and hopes to subdue phenomena. Free yourself from the terror of the heart that seeks and hopes to find the essence of things. Conquer the last, the greatest temptation of all: Hope. This is the third duty.

Yet the rejection of hope does not imply passivity—we still should strive. “We fight because we like fighting, we sing even though there is no ear to hear us. We work even though there is no master to pay us our wages when night falls.” This should remind us that we are radically impermanent:

I revolve for a moment in air, I breathe, my heart beats, my mind glows, and suddenly the earth opens, and I vanish … Say farewell to all things at every moment … Look about you: All these bodies that you see shall rot. There is no salvation. Look at them well: They live, work, love, hope. Look again: Nothing exists! The generations of man rise from the earth and fall into the earth again.

How should we respond to all this? He answers, as usual, with beautiful prose:

The endeavors and virtues of man accumulate, increase, and mount to the sky. Where are we going? Do not ask! Ascend, descend. There is no beginning and no end … What is our goal? To be shipwrecked! … Without hope, but with bravery, it is your duty to set your prow calmly toward the abyss. And to say: “Nothing exists!” … Neither life nor death. I watch mind and matter hunting each other like two nonexistent erotic phantasms—merging, begetting, disappearing—and I say: “This is what I want!”

We don’t ask where we are going; we proceed; we ascend; we find meaning in the struggle. He concludes this section with what will be his epitaph:

I know now: I do not hope for anything. I do not fear anything, I have freed myself from both the mind and the heart, I have mounted much higher, I am free. This is what I want. I want nothing more. I have been seeking freedom.

These preparatory exhortations are meant to free us from the hopes and fears that trouble us, and which impede both individual development and the ascent of the species. With our duties in place, he now moves on to the second section: “The March.” It begins with a cry from within human consciousness to help free some upwardly striving reality. 

… when I hear the Cry, my emotions and the Universe are divided into two camps. Someone within me is in danger, he raises his hands and shouts: “Save me!” Someone within me climbs, stumbles, and shouts: “Help me! Which of the two eternal roads shall I choose? … Of the two, I choose the ascending path. Why? For no intelligible reason, without any certainty … “Upward! Upward! Upward!” my heart shouts, and I follow it trustingly. I feel this is what the dread primordial cry asks of me … I do not know from where he comes or where he goes. I clutch at his onward march … I listen to his panting struggle …

Some invisible tide seems to be moving forward and upward, but it needs our help to proceed. There are four steps on this journey or march. (Some interpreters call these things we must transcend to unite with God or reality. I prefer to think of them as successive, expanding circles of consciousness which manifest the ascent of the cosmos.)

The first step, describing the transcendence or ascent he calls “The Ego.” We are physically, intellectually, and emotionally deficient; we have a body, brain, and heart, but we should “struggle to subdue them to a rhythm superior to that of the mind, harsher than that of my heart—to the ascending rhythm of the Universe.” This is clearly Kazantzakis’ god, this evolutionary process by which higher levels of being and consciousness emerge.

“Where are we going? Shall we ever win? What is the purpose of all this fighting? Be silent! Soldiers never question!” … But within me a deathless Cry … continues to shout. For whether I want to or not, I am … part of the visible and the invisible Universe. We are one. The powers which labor within me, the powers which goad me on to live, the powers which goad me on to die are … its own powers also … an onrush of the Universe fears, hopes, and shouts with me … It is not I but He who shouts.

The second step, describing the second thing we must overcome, he calls, “The Race.”

“THE CRY IS not yours. It is not you talking, but innumerable ancestors talking with your mouth. It is not you who desire, but innumerable generations of descendants longing with your heart … Future generations do not move far from you … They live, desire, and act in your loins and your heart … You are not one; you are a body of troops, One of your faces lights up for a moment under the sun. Then suddenly it vanishes, and another, a younger one, lights up behind you. The race of men from which you come is the huge body of the past, the present, and the future. It is the face itself; you are a passing expression … “Do not die that we may not die,” the dead cry out within you … “Finish our work! Finish our work! … Deliver us!”

Still, the individual is unique and important, for “As soon as you were born, a new possibility was born with you … you brought a new rhythm, a new desire, a new idea, a fresh sorrow … you enriched your ancestral body …” Now it is up to you to carry on:

How shall you confront life and death, virtue and fear? All the race … asks questions … and lies waiting in agony. You have a great responsibility. You do not govern now only your own small, insignificant existence. You are a throw of the dice on which, for a moment, the entire fate of your race is gambled. Everything you do reverberates throughout a thousand destinies. As you walk, you cut open and create that river bed into which the stream of your descendants shall enter and flow  … “I am not done! I am not done!” Let this vision inflame you at every moment.

We then must we do?

… Someone is fighting to escape you, to tear himself away from your flesh, to be freed of you. A seed in your loins, a seed in your brains, does not want to remain with you any more … A power greater than you passes through you … shouting: “Gamble the present and all things certain, gamble them for the future and all things uncertain! Hold nothing in reserve … We may be lost, we may be saved. Do not ask. Place the whole world in the hands of danger every single moment …”

Now Kazantzakis leads us to the third step “Mankind.” We must transcend, not only our ego and our race but humanity itself and its humble beginnings:

See how he has detached himself from the animal, how he struggles to stand upright, to co-ordinate his inarticulate cries, to feed the flame between his hearthstones, to feed his mind amid the bones of his skull. Let pity overwhelm you for this creature who one morning detached himself from the ape, naked, defenseless, without teeth or horns, with only a spark of fire in his soft skull … look at the centuries behind you. What do you see? Hairy, blood-splattered beasts rising in tumult out of the mud …

The “multitudes ascend like grass out of the soil and fall into the soil again, fertile manure for future offspring.” This leads to the realization “of blind, heartless, brainless, ravenous powers” that permeates existence. “We sail on a storm-tossed sea … The centuries are thick, dark waves that rise and fall, steeped in blood …” How should we respond?

Gaze on the dark sea without staggering, confront the abyss every moment without illusion or impudence or fear. WITHOUT ILLUSION, impudence, or fear. But this is not enough; take a further step: battle to give meaning to the confused struggles of man.

And how might we do this?

Encompass through one century, then through two centuries, through three, through ten, through as many centuries as you can bear, the onward march of mankind. Train your eye to gaze on people moving in great stretches of time. Immerse yourself in this vision with patience, with love and high disinterestedness, until slowly the world begins to breathe within you …

All of this brings Kazantzakis full circle back to the voyages of Odysseus:

We are … out of a gigantic Odyssey … to give meaning to our voyage, to battle undauntedly … and then … to erect in our brains, marrow of our marrow, our Ithaca. Out of an ocean of nothingness, with fearful struggle, the work of man rises slowly like a small island. Within this arena … generations work and love and hope and vanish. New generations tread on the corpses of their fathers, continue the work above the abyss and struggle to tame the dread mystery. How? By cultivating a single field, by kissing a woman, by studying a stone, an animal, an idea …

Against the powers which seek to overwhelm us, we can live honorably:

The mind is a seafaring laborer whose work is to build a seawall in chaos. From all these generations, from all these joys and sorrows … a single voice rings out, pure and serene … because, though it contains all the sins and disquietudes of struggling man, it yet flies beyond them all and mounts higher still.

Now that the ego, the race, and humanity have been transcended, there is the fourth step, what he calls “The Earth.” He begins: “IT IS NOT you who call … It is not only the white, yellow, and black generations of man calling … It is the entire Earth …” Here he connects us with something even larger than our ego or humanity—the entire history of cosmic evolution. But there is more to come, and here I find a prefiguring of transhumanism:

… I passed beyond the thick-leaved plants, I passed beyond the fishes, the birds, the beasts, the apes. I created man … and now I struggle to be rid of him … Only now … do we begin dimly to apprehend why the animals fought, begot, and died; and behind them the plants; and behind these the huge reserve of inorganic forces. We are moved by pity, gratitude, and esteem for our old comrades-in-arms. They toiled, loved, and died to open a road for our coming. We also toil with the same delight, agony, and exaltation for the sake of Someone Else who with every courageous deed of ours proceeds one step farther. All our struggle once more will have a purpose much greater than we … It is as though the whole of life were the visible, eternal pursuit of an invisible Bridegroom who … hunts down his untamed Bride, Eternity.

The third section, which lays out Kazantzakis’ conception of his god, is called “The Vision.” His view somewhat reminds me of Hegel’s idea of absolute spirit, to the extent I even understand Hegel’s philosophy. For Kazantzakis Spirit is this march onward and upward, an anti-entropic power from which order emerges out of chaos. In his words: “God is struggling to heave upward … God struggles in every thing, his hands flung upward toward the light.” So it seems that all this ceaseless, cosmic striving is his god. The struggle to find God is God. 

The fourth section, which encourages us to help god emerge, is called, “The Action”. Kazantzakis says that “God is imperiled. He is not almighty, that we may cross our hands, waiting for certain victory. He is not all-holy, that we may wait trusting for him to pity and to save us … He cannot be saved unless we save him with our own struggles; nor can we be saved unless he is saved.” This is a kind of process theology—divinity is becoming. 

It is not God who will save us—it is we who will save God, by battling, by creating, and by transmuting matter into spirit … But all our struggle may go lost. If we tire, if we grow faint of spirit, if we fall into panic, then the entire Universe becomes imperiled. Life is a crusade in the service of God. Whether we wished to or not, we set out as crusaders to free … that God buried in matter and in our souls … We do not only free God by battling and subduing the visible world about us; we also create God.

The final section of the work, which Kazantzakis added toward the end of his life, is titled “The Silence.“ It begins by reiterating some of his previous themes: 

The ego, race, mankind, earth, theory and action, God—all these are phantasms … good only for those simple hearts that live in fear, good only for those flatulent souls that imagine they are pregnant. Where do we come from? Where are we going? What is the meaning of this life? That is what every heart is shouting …

Now he introduces the idea of the silence.

This ultimate stage of our spiritual exercise is called Silence. Not because its contents are the ultimate inexpressible despair or the ultimate inexpressible joy and hope. Nor because it is the ultimate knowledge which does not condescend to speak, or the ultimate ignorance which cannot. Silence means: Every person, after completing his service in all labors, reaches finally the highest summit of endeavor, beyond every labor, where he no longer struggles or shouts, where he ripens fully in silence … with the entire Universe. There he merges with the Abyss … How can you reach … the Abyss to make it fruitful? This cannot be expressed, cannot be narrowed into words, cannot be subjected to laws; every man is completely free and has his own special liberation. No form of instruction exists, no Savior exists to open up the road. No road exists to be opened.

This reminds me of Wittgenstein’s: “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” Or of Aquinas’: “Such things have been revealed to me in prayer that what I have written seems to me to be rubbish. And now in silence, I will await the end of my life.” Or even Taoism’s: “The Tao that can be expressed is not the eternal Tao; The that can be defined is not the unchanging name.” For Kazantzakis, our role is to align ourselves with the ascent toward higher levels of being and consciousness, but even these words don’t fully capture truth—neither the mind nor the heart can.

Kazantzakis’ conclusion to these spiritual exercises shocked me. After reiterating that God needs our help in order to become real, Kazantzakis says:

Blessed be all of those who free you and become united with you, Lord, and who say: ’You and I are one.’ And thrice blessed be those who bear on their shoulders and do not buckle under this great, sublime, and terrifying secret: ‘That even this one does not exist!’

Here it seems that Kazantzakis advocates nihilism—nothing ultimately matters. But I don’t think this is quite right. He is asking us to keep going, to always ascend. Like Odysseus, we should never anchor, as the journey itself is our true homeland. We may not know the meaning of our lives, but we can still play our small role as links in a chain that leads, hopefully, onward and upward. That is the meaning of our lives.    

It is hard to communicate the experience I have had reading Kazantzakis. I don’t share his theological sensibilities, but having been raised with them I understand them. If he were alive today I think he would be a transhumanist, although he might reject all salvific narratives. Where are we going? As he said, don’t ask just proceed without fear, without hope, and you will be free. In future posts, I will explore his rejection of hope.

_________________________________________________________________________

[i]  Quoted in James Christian, Philosophy: An Introduction to the Art of Wondering, 11th ed. (Belmont CA.: Wadsworth, 2012), 656.

All translations can be found at http://www.angel.net/~nic/askitiki.ht...

It’s Interesting but Is It Art?

[image error]by Sylvia Jane Wojcik

Manifestations of imagination and creativity we commonly call “art” are all around us—not just as the drawings, paintings, and sculptures we associate with museums but also as performance (of plays, music, and movies) and composition (of poetry, music, stories, and novels).  [They have] a practical dimension as well. It extends to architecture and landscape design—think of the Empire State Building, the Brooklyn Bridge and Central Park in New York City, and all manner of utilitarian objects, ranging from furniture and clothing to cartoons and illustration.

But just because something we make or something we do may reflect varying degrees of aesthetic expression does not mean it is art.  Art goes beyond beauty and skill—it’s more than about being pretty or quality of execution.  Being pleasing to the eye and faithfully represented on paper, canvas, or marble are certainly necessary components of art but are not in themselves sufficient.  So what’s missing?

What true art is really all about is helping to communicate hard-to-understand abstract ideas about our experience of the world and our place in it.  Though human awareness begins at the concrete level through direct perception of sense data, we do much our thinking on the conceptual level of abstractions.  For our concepts and theories to make any sense they must have a metaphysical grounding.  But concepts are extremely problematic to convey—they’re intangibles we can neither see nor touch.  So the most effective way to convey their meaning is to show rather than tell by reducing them to concrete percepts that are more readily, even instantly, understandable.*

This is what art does, especially for the widest, most important abstractions that constitute our world view—our sense of life.  Think of the complexity of conveying the idea of love, with all its exquisite agony and ecstasy, by way of Romeo and Juliet, the Statue of Liberty representing America as a land of freedom, and Michelangelo’s David symbolizing the courage to fight tyranny in the form of Goliath and it’s easy to see why it is said that a picture is worth a thousand words.  These things are beautiful, true enough, but it is not beauty itself but the emotion inherent in the ideas conveyed that move and inspire us—often to act.  For something to be art, therefore, it must be about an idea universal to the human condition.  Lacking this quality the object or piece is more about having decorative value than being art.

Exactly how does the artist make this happen?  Since experience is a stream of innumerable instances of sense data, the only way an artist can convey his vision is to pick and choose among those elements that help communicate his point.  Philosopher Ayn Rand famously calls it the “selective re-creation of reality.”  What the artist chooses to include and how he renders these details in terms of composition, color, and style is what is “artistic” about art.  The artist’s vision and execution, his intellectual idea and expressive skill, tell a story—not just how the world is, but how we think it should be—what it means for the human prospect.  We don’t do art because we want to create art, as such; we do it because we want to share our experience of life’s realities and our vision of its potential and do it as perfectly as we possibly can.  To the extent it resonates with others in terms of idea and form it succeeds as art.

Now we can argue whether this distinction—between art as idea versus art as decoration—is too narrow, but the important thing is to recognize is that there is a distinction.  This is somewhat akin to confusion over the use of “right” and “good.” They do not mean the same thing even though, because of language conventions, we often use both terms interchangeably.  The right is an ethical concept in that it involves actions we consciously choose regarding how we should treat one another; the good, on the other hand, is morally neutral and simply reflects a valued relationship that one object or entity poses for the utility or well-being of another.  When we say someone is a “good (or bad) boy” we are speaking of the propriety of his actions—not a relational goodness in the sense of effectiveness we mean when we say an implement is a “good (or bad) tool” for the job at hand.  The former is about interpersonal conduct; the latter about functional suitability.  I find prefacing each term with the article “the” serves to go a long way towards clarifying ambiguity over-usage. Converting the terms to nouns, as in “the right” and “the good,” seems to provide a dimensionality or concreteness that clears up misunderstanding that comes from using them as adjectives.

Perhaps the debate would be less contentious if art were thought of as running along a continuum from decoration to idea rather than in categorical pass/fail terms.  The reality is that it’s hardly ever entirely one or the other.  A Grecian urn may have started out as utilitarian but its design and execution—of heroic Trojan War battle scenes stylistically depicted, for example, are such as to be worth considering as true art.  But a Navajo or Persian rug?  Probably not.  A Medieval tapestry portraying chivalry?  Much more likely.  There is a difference between the exalted and what is merely “cool”—between something by da Vinci and an elaborately engraved Civil War sword.  Not everything on Antiques Roadshow is art—at least in the truest sense.  Execution must be married to significance in order to touch the sublime as the sine qua non of true art.

The second misconception obstructing an understanding of what true art is—especially in today’s postmodern era—lies in the belief that art is undefinable, mysterious, and subjective in the sense of being “in the eye of the beholder” (not to mention its creator)—that it’s all about preference and anything we want it to be.  But, if we recognize the role art plays in human consciousness regarding the way we acquire abstract ideas, we know this cannot be true. For something to be art it must make a comment about some aspect of real-world experience as it is or could be.  In this important sense, art is objective and universal.

This leads to an important implication: for something to truly be considered art it must be capable of being understood.  It has to be recognizable as representative of a meaningful aspect of reality. If it only makes sense to the artist it cannot truly be considered as art. This is why much of what tries to pass as art is at best mere decoration.  When trying to figure out what to make of Rothko’s planes of color, Duchamp’s urinal, or Warhol’s soup cans, the honest viewer can only wonder, “it’s interesting—even beautiful, perhaps, but is it art?”

Norman Rockwell’s painting, The Connoisseur, makes this point perfectly.  How better to convey the idea of the frustration involved in trying to figure out what something is that seems to be about nothing!  Jackson Pollock-style splotches and drippings in the painting are untethered to reality and are therefore meaningless.  What is meaningful and therefore “artistic” about this painting is the use of irony to convey its message by juxtaposing a realistically rendered viewer against the abstract painting he’s trying to make heads or tails out of.  Because we don’t see his face, the gentleman serves as an everyman figure inviting us, as “any man,” as it were, to answer the question of “what art is” for ourselves.

This is not to say there is no subjectivity in art, but that it’s limited to preferences about subject or disagreement over the quality of execution and style. We might prefer the pre-Raphaelite realism of John Williams Waterhouse’s The Lady of Shalott over the Cubism of Picasso’s Guernica or any number of Thomas Cole’s sylvan Hudson River landscapes in the way some like vanilla more than chocolate (or strawberry) but never that art can be art without being about some universal, meaningful, and understandable facet of human experience.

This debate reveals a conflict inherent in the nature of art that makes definitive judgment problematic.  On one hand, we say that art is about the expression of the universal in the human spirit while on the other recognizing that each of us sees the world from a particular vantage point.  If our experience of the universal is necessarily personal, then what genuinely moves any one individual may well not be what moves others.  Objective content versus subjective perception of that content is at the heart of the problem of art.  This is why the aesthetic enterprise is about dealing with shades of gray and always will be—which is why judging art is, well, an art and not a science.  It’s certainly frustrating but also what makes the subject ever fascinating.

Despite the problem posed by this paradox, I stand by my vision of art as presented herein.  As long as human nature is universal across time and space, as it has been up to now, I believe it is generally possible to legitimately judge what “good” art is and is not.  Philosophical skepticism may play well in the classroom, but in the everyday world there is a self-correcting “fact and value” consensus as to how the world works and how we should live in it driven by what works to promote our ability to survive and thrive.  As part of that world, art and our idea of what it is must conform to this overall vision of reality.  ________________________________________________________________________                                                         

*This conception of art as a perceptual aid might be made clearer if we look at the way clichés work.  Clichés are pithy phrases serving as instantly recognizable shorthand for complex ideas.  When someone makes a reference to the need to “get out of Dodge,” for example, we (at least those of us of a certain age who grew up with TV’s Gunsmoke) know exactly what is meant.  We picture in our mind a situation so threatening that we have to leave the scene immediately to avoid being hurt or killed.

Truth & Justice

In a previous post, I promised to discuss two great ideas—truth and justice. A lifetime of study wouldn’t suffice to properly discuss these two ideas, but I wanted to offer something.

There are many great ideas. The philosophical popularizer of last century, Mortimer Adler, wrote a massive tome two-volume work entitled:The Great Ideas – A Syntopicon – I (Angel To Love) and THE GREAT IDEAS: A SYNTOPICON – II, (MAN TO WORLD)[image error]. It contained 102 great ideas which Adler later paired down to six in his book, Six Great Ideas (1981). 

Those six were: truth, beauty, goodness, liberty, equality, and justice. Adler distinguished these in triads: truth, beauty, and goodness are ideas we judge by; liberty, equality, and justice are ideas we act on. I think the organization of the triads is illuminating.

1. Truth

Adler holds that truth is the sovereign idea by which we judge. He believes that beauty is a special kind of goodness, which is itself a special kind of truth. He also holds that truth—by distinguishing certain from doubtful judgments, and by differentiating matters of taste and matters of truth—provides the ground for understanding beauty and goodness. Whether this is true or not I’ll leave for the reader to consider. 

Yet there is something intuitively plausible in this analysis. If we know what’s true, we would know what was good and beautiful. (This depends on the Adler’s acceptance of philosophical realism and a correspondence theory of truth.) But knowing what’s good or beautiful does not seem to entail that we know what’s true—the relationship is not symmetrical. Thus truth seemingly regulates our thinking about goodness and beauty; it is the one to which the other two are subordinate. And, as I’ve stated many times, if the truth isn’t important, then nothing much else matters. Truth is surely one of the greatest ideas.

2. Justice

As for the ideas we act on, justice reigns supreme. Here I find Adler’s argument especially compelling. He argues that justice is an unlimited good, while liberty and equality are limited goods. The distinction comes from Aristotle. We can have too much of limited goods, while we cannot have too much of an unlimited good. Societies can have too much liberty or equality, but not too much justice.

The argument is straightforward. For political libertarians, liberty is the highest value and they seek to maximize liberty at the expense of equality. They want near unlimited liberty even if the result is irremediable inequality, and even if large portions of society suffer serious deprivations. They may favor equality of opportunity, knowing that those with superior endowments or (more likely) favorable circumstances will beat their fellows in the race of life. The resulting vast inequality doesn’t deter them, for in their view trying to achieve equality will result in the loss of the higher value, liberty. On the other hand, egalitarians regard equality as the highest value and willingly infringe upon liberty to bring about equality of outcomes. In their view, equality of opportunity will not suffice since that will still result in vast inequality, the supreme virtue in their eyes.

The solution recognizes that liberty and equality are both subservient to justice. Individuals should not have so much freedom of action that they injure others, deprive them of their freedom, or cause them serious deprivations. One should only have as much freedom as justice allows. Analogously, should a society try to achieve equality of outcomes even if that entails serious deprivations of human freedom? Should we ignore the fact that individuals are unequal in their endowments and achievements? No says Adler to both questions. We should only have as much equality as justice allows.

Regarding liberty, justice places limits on the amount allowed; regarding equality, justice places limits on the kind and degree it allows. Thus justice places limits on the subordinate values of liberty and equality. Too much of either liberty or equality results in an unjust society. I agree with Adler, justice is the ultimate idea of moral and political philosophy and truth is the ultimate idea in metaphysics and epistemology.

Better Off Dead?

Having taught medical ethics for more than a decade, I have spent some time reading, thinking and writing about the subject. In 1994 I published a piece called, “Worse Off Alive: Reply to Garcia” in the American Philosophical Association’s Newsletter On Philosophy and Medicine. The newsletter is still published, but a twenty-year-old hard copy is hard to find and no soft copy exists, as far as I know. Here is the original version based on my hard copy.

“Worse Off Alive: Reply to Garcia” (from the American Philosophical Association’s Newsletter On Philosophy and Medicine, 1994.)

The goal of J.L.A Garcia’s article, “Better Off Dead,”(Volume 92, No. 1, pp. 82-85) “is to cast doubt on the doctrines that someone’s dying can be a good thing for that person, that some lives are not worth living, and that there can be a right to die.” Thus, he argues, we are never “better off dead” and that nearly all human lives are worth living. He also implies—but never specifically argues—that there is no right to die. I argue that, though we are not “better off dead,” to the sense that death is an experienceless state, we may be “worse off alive” in situations when enduring extraordinary suffering. I also argue that lives deprived of certain goods are not worth living. Let us examine Garcia’s arguments in turn.

According to Garcia, euthanasia proponents deem death an instrumental good because it relieves a patient’s suffering. But instrumental goods, he argues, are good only when they “make our lives go better,” and being free from anxiety or physical pain “is good inasmuch as it yields a less troubled life.” Since causing or allowing someone to die does not make their lives go better, it is not an instrumental good. In short, dying brings about no good for a person—since dead persons don’t exist—and thus, one cannot be “better off dead.”

Garcia is partly correct. It is never better to be dead in the sense that one’s life benefits or improves by dying, and therefore if death is non-existence as he seems to suppose, being dead is itself neither good or bad. The problem with this argument is twofold: 1) it reduces to the self-evident and trivial assertion that non-existent persons cannot experience good; and 2) it misconstrues the issue. Few persons who desire to be relieved from excruciating suffering believe they will gain from their death by experiencing some benefit, except possibly in an afterlife. What they obviously do believe is that, in their present condition, they are “worse off alive,” and this justifies euthanasia for them. In their condition, they prefer death to life because life offers so little, not because death offers some gain or benefit.

Now in certain cases Garcia seems to agree: “When we permissibly withhold or terminate treatment in such cases, it is because we judge that the kind of life that aggressive treatment could secure the patient is not so great a good as to require us to secure it at staggering cost to the patient herself or to others.” Presumably, the cases to which he refers are those that employ extraordinary means, though he does not explain why this rationale applies only to these cases. Nonetheless, if life is not the only good, as he admits, and the kinds of life secured by certain treatments are not good enough to be preferred to death, then we are sometimes “worse off alive.”

Next Garcia turns to the claim that some lives are not “worthwhile.” This claim, he argues, results from the disparity between healthy, highly educated, refined, and economically advantaged bioethicists, and the dying. These professionals judge the quality of life of the dying to be quite minimal, overlooking many similarities between themselves and the dying, particularly their shared existential despair. Such considerations [should] caution us against hasty generalizations about the value of human lives. Who is to say that our lives, projects, and goals are valuable? And if we cannot be certain about the value of our own lives, how can we be so sure about the value of the lives of others?

This argument is problematic for at least two reasons: 1) it applies only to those advocating non-voluntary active euthanasia; and 2) what follows from it is that we [should] reject proxy judgments of the value of individual lives, not that it is never better to die or that all lives are worth living. What he has shown is that by resisting generalizations and proxy judgments we respect human autonomy, a fundamental value according to Garcia, “even if the choices we make are often disastrous.”

Garcia concludes by “rejecting the suggestions that it might be better for someone to die and that her life might be improved by her death.” He correctly assumes that our lives do not improve when we die because then, obviously, we no longer have experiences. And if life is a good so great that no possible agony, suffering, evil, pain, or torment negate its value, then life is always preferable to death.

However, most ordinary individuals disagree. They applaud the advanced directives for health care, sign their living wills, and ask their spouses, friends, sons or daughters to act as their surrogates. They choose to forgo the remainder of lives deprived of those things that make life valuable—the ability to love, think, touch, reflect, and remember—for the uncertainty of death. They prefer not to debase human life or glorify suffering but to exercise human autonomy. For those who believe there is meaning in the most excruciating forms of physical pain and dementia—let them be free to suffer if they so choose. But for those of us who believe that, at least sometimes, we are “worse off alive”—let others respect our autonomy as well.

_________________________________________________________________________

Addendum  – I still agree with the sentiment of this paper from twenty years ago—there are fates worse than death. If I am in even the earliest stages of dementia, knowing the toll this desease will take on my family, I will hopefully find a way to end my life. When one’s consciousness has been serverly compromised and will probably become increasingly compromised, life has lost any possible meaning it might have. Moreover, I would happily die rather than subject my family to such a fate.

Ideally, science and technology will overcome death and suffering. But in the meantime, I hope others respect my autonomy and help me die (assuming it doesn’t put them in legal jeopardy) when I deem life no longer worth living. And if I can’t voice these preferences—say because of being comatose or demented—I would hope my family will respect my wishes. Perhaps they can at least take me to the Netherlands or some other country with liberal euthanasia laws. (For more please consult advanced directives for healthcare.)

JGM – February 2020

Adam Smith on David Hume

David Hume died August 25, 1776. Diarist and biographer James Boswell saw Hume a few weeks before his death, which was from some form of abdominal cancer. Hume told him he sincerely believed it a “most unreasonable fancy” that there might be life after death … He also asked that his body be interred in a “simple Roman tomb”. In his will he requests that it be inscribed only with his name and the year of his birth and death, “leaving it to Posterity to add the Rest.” … Adam Smith later recounted Hume’s amusing speculation that he might ask Charon to allow him a few more years of life in order to see “the downfall of some of the prevailing systems of superstition.” The ferryman replied, “You loitering rogue, that will not happen these many hundred years … Get into the boat this instant”. 1

On November 9, 1776, shortly after Hume’s death, the great economist Adam Smith wrote a letter to Hume’s good friend William Strahan, Esq. Here are some excerpts:

DEAR SIR,

It is with a real, though a very melancholy pleasure, that I sit down to give you some account of the behaviour of our late excellent friend, Mr. Hume, during his last illness.
…
Upon his return to Edinburgh, though he found himself much weaker, yet his cheerfulness never abated, and he continued to divert himself, as usual, with correcting his own works for a new edition, with reading books of amusement, with the conversation of his friends; and, sometimes in the evening, with a party at his favourite game of whist. His cheerfulness was so great, and his conversation and amusements run so much in their usual strain, that, notwithstanding all bad symptoms, many people could not believe he was dying.
…
Mr. Hume’s magnanimity and firmness were such, that his most affectionate friends knew, that they hazarded nothing in talking or writing to him as to a dying man, and that so far from being hurt by this frankness, he was rather pleased and flattered by it. I happened to come into his room while he was reading this letter, which he had just received, and which he immediately showed me. I told him, that though I was sensible how very much he was weakened, and that appearances were in many respects very bad, yet his cheerfulness was still so great, the spirit of life seemed still to be so very strong in him, that I could not help entertaining some faint hopes. He answered, “Your hopes are groundless. An habitual diarrhoea of more than a year’s standing, would be a very bad disease at any age: at my age it is a mortal one. When I lie down in the evening, I feel myself weaker than when I rose in the morning; and when I rise in the morning, weaker than when I lay down in the evening. I am sensible, besides, that some of my vital parts are affected, so that I must soon die.”
…
But, though Mr. Hume always talked of his approaching dissolution with great
cheerfulness, he never affected to make any parade of his magnanimity. He never
mentioned the subject but when the conversation naturally led to it, and never dwelt
longer upon it than the course of the conversation happened to require: it was a subject
indeed which occurred pretty frequently, in consequence of the inquiries which his
friends, who came to see him, naturally made concerning the state of his health. The
conversation which I mentioned above, and which passed on Thursday the 8th of August,
was the last, except one, that I ever had with him. He had now become so very weak, that
the company of his most intimate friends fatigued him; for his cheerfulness was still so
great, his complaisance and social disposition were still so entire, that when any friend was with him, he could not help talking more, and with greater exertion, than suited the
weakness of his body. At his own desire, therefore, I agreed to leave Edinburgh …

On the 22d of August, the Doctor wrote me  the following letter:

“Since my last, Mr. Hume has passed his time pretty easily, but is much weaker. He
sits up, goes down stairs once a day, and amuses himself with reading, but seldom sees
any body. He finds that even the conversation of his most intimate friends fatigues and
oppresses him; and it is happy that he does not need it, for he is quite free from anxiety,
impatience, or low spirits, and passes his time very well with the assistance of amusing
books.”

I received the day after a letter from Mr. Hume himself, of which the following is an extract.

23d August, 1776.

“MY DEAREST FRIEND, I am obliged to make use of my nephew’s hand in writing to you, as I do not rise to-day. . . .

“I go very fast to decline, and last night had a small fever, which I hoped might put a quicker period to this tedious illness, but unluckily it has, in a great measure, gone off. I cannot submit to your coming over here on my account, as it is possible for me to see you so small a part of the day, but Doctor Black can better inform you concerning the degree of strength which may from time to time remain with me. Adieu, &c.”

Three days after I received the following letter from Doctor Black.

Edinburgh, Monday, 26th August, 1776.

“DEAR SIR, Yesterday about four o’clock afternoon, Mr. Hume expired. The near approach of his death became evident in the night between Thursday and Friday, when his disease became excessive, and soon weakened him so much, that he could no longer rise out of his bed. He continued to the last perfectly sensible, and free from much pain or feelings of distress. He never dropped the smallest expression of impatience; but when he had occasion to speak to the people about him, always did it with affection and tenderness. I thought it improper to write to bring you over, especially as I heard that he had dictated a letter to you desiring you not to come. When he became very weak, it cost him an effort to speak, and he died in such a happy composure of mind, that nothing could exceed it.”

In his own words Smith’s letter concludes:

Thus died our most excellent, and never to be forgotten friend; concerning whose philosophical opinions men will, no doubt, judge variously, every one approving, or condemning them, according as they happen to coincide or disagree with his own; but concerning whose character and conduct there can scarce be a difference of opinion. His temper, indeed, seemed to be more happily balanced, if I may be allowed such an expression, than that perhaps of any other man I have ever known. Even in the lowest state of his fortune, his great and necessary frugality never hindered him from exercising, upon proper occasions, acts both of charity and generosity. It was a frugality founded, not upon avarice, but upon the love of independency. The extreme gentleness of his nature never weakened either the firmness of his mind, or the steadiness of his resolutions. His constant pleasantry was the genuine effusion of good-nature and good-humour, tempered with delicacy and modesty, and without even the slightest tincture of malignity, so frequently the disagreeable source of what is called wit in other men. It never was the meaning of his raillery to mortify; and therefore, far from offending, it seldom failed to please and delight, even those who were the objects of it. To his friends, who were frequently the objects of it, there was not perhaps any one of all his great and amiable qualities, which contributed more to endear his conversation. And that gaiety of temper, so agreeable in society, but which is so often accompanied with frivolous and superficial qualities, was in him certainly attended with the most severe application, the most extensive learning, the greatest depth of thought, and a capacity in every respect the most comprehensive. Upon the whole, I have always considered him, both in his lifetime and since his death, as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit.

I Ever Am, Dear Sir,
Most Affectionately Your’s,
Adam Smith.

__________________________________________

from Wikipedia

The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant

Nick Bostrom (1973 – ) holds a PhD from the London School of Economics (2000). He is a co-founder of the World Transhumanist Association (now called Humanity+) and co–founder of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. He was on the faculty of Yale University until 2005, when he was appointed Director of the newly created Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University. He is currently Professor, Faculty of Philosophy & Oxford Martin School; Director, Future of Humanity Institute; and Director, Program on the Impacts of Future Technology; all at Oxford University.

Bostrom’s article, “The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant,” tells the story of a planet ravaged by a dragon (death) that demands a tribute which is satisfied only by consuming thousands of people each day. Neither priests with curses, warriors with weapons, or chemists with concoctions could defeat the dragon. The elders were selected to be sacrificed, although they were often wiser than the young, because they had at least lived longer than the youth. Here is a description of their situation:

Spiritual men sought to comfort those who were afraid of being eaten by the dragon (which included almost everyone, although many denied it in public) by promising another life after death, a life that would be free from the dragon-scourge. Other orators argued that the dragon has its place in the natural order and a moral right to be fed. They said that it was part of the very meaning of being human to end up in the dragon’s stomach. Others still maintained that the dragon was good for the human species because it kept the population size down. To what extent these arguments convinced the worried souls is not known. Most people tried to cope by not thinking about the grim end that awaited them.

Given the ceaselessness of the dragon’s consumption, most people did not fight it and accepted the inevitable. A whole industry grew up to study and delay the process of being eaten by the dragon, and a large portion of the society’s wealth was used for these purposes. As their technology grew, some suggested that they would one day build flying machines, communicate over great distances without wires, or even be able to slay the dragon. Most dismissed these ideas.

Finally, a group of iconoclastic scientists figured out that a projectile could be built to pierce the dragon’s scales. However, to build this technology would cost vast sums of money and they would need the king’s support. (Unfortunately, the king was busy raging war killing tigers, which cost the society vast sums of wealth and accomplished little.) The scientists then began to educate the public about their proposals and the people became excited about the prospect of killing the dragon. In response the king convened a conference to discuss the options.

First to speak was a scientist who explained carefully how research should yield a solution to the problem of killing the dragon in about twenty years. But the king’s moral advisors said that it is presumptuous to think you have a right not to be eaten by the dragon; they said that finitude is a blessing and removing it would remove human dignity and debase life. Nature decrees, they said, that dragons eat people and people should be eaten. Next to speak was a spiritual sage who told the people not to be afraid of the dragon, but a little boy crying about his grandma’s death moved most toward the anti-dragon position.

However, when the people realized that millions would die before the research was completed, they frantically sought out financing for anti-dragon research and the king complied. This started a technological race to kill the dragon, although the process was painstakingly slow, and filled with many mishaps. Finally, after twelve years of research the king launch a successful dragon-killing missile. The people were happy but the king saddened that they had not started their research years earlier—millions had died unnecessarily. As to what was next for his civilization, the king proclaimed:

Today we are like children again. The future lies open before us. We shall go into this future and try to do better than we have done in the past. We have time now—time to get things right, time to grow up, time to learn from our mistakes, time for the slow process of building a better world… 

Summary – We should try to overcome the tyranny of death with technology.

_____________________________________________________________________

Nick Bostrom, “The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant,” Journal of Medical Ethics (2005) Vol. 31, No. 5: 273.
Bostrom, “The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant,” 277.

Marcus Aurelius: Meditations

Statue of Marcus Aurelius on horseback.

(The following post from March 2015, recently surpassed 100,000 views. I reprint it below.)

If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.~ Marcus Aurelius

Marcus Aurelius (121 – 180 AD) was Roman Emperor from 161 to 180 and is one of the most important Stoic philosophers. What today we call the Meditations take the form of a personal notebook, which wasn’t intended for publication. Aurelius called them “Writings To Myself.” They were written in Greek, although his native tongue was Latin, and were probably composed while he was on military campaigns in central Europe, c. AD 171-175. Today it is widely regarded as one of the most important works in all of Western literature. He died, most likely from the plague or cancer, on a military campaign in present-day Austria. The work is divided into 12 short books.

In Book I Aurelius thanks those to whom he is indebted. He thanks his grandfather for teaching him to be candid, modest, and even-tempered; his father for teaching him to be humble, calm, and frugal; his mother for teaching him to be generous and non-materialistic; and his teachers who taught him the value of hard work, self-discipline, equanimity, rationality, humor, and tolerance. From his teachers, he also learned to love practical philosophy, instead of metaphysics, logic and the vanity of the Sophists. He also thanks his wife for being affectionate.

In Book II Aurelius reminds us that each day we will meet some terrible people. But we have faults too, so we shouldn’t be angry with them. For we are all just bits of blood, bones, and breath; our life is fleeting; our bodies will decay. As for death, it is nothing to fear; it can’t hurt us. But what is most important about us is our minds. We shouldn’t let them be slaves to selfish passions, quarrel with fate, or be anxious about the present or afraid of the future. We can’t guarantee fame or fortune, but we can keep our minds calm and free from injury, a state superior to both pleasure and pain. Freedom is the control of our minds.

In Book III Aurelius tells us to be mindful of little things like cracks in a loaf of bread, the texture of figs and olives, and the expressions of wild animals—even mundane things have charm he says. But we shouldn’t gossip or speculate about what others say or do. Instead, think and talk only about things you would not be ashamed of if they were found out. Think and talk with sincerity and cheerfulness, and there will be a kind of divinity within you. There is nothing more valuable than a mind pursuing truth, justice, temperance, fortitude, rationality and the like. So be resolute in pursuit of the good.

In Book IV Aurelius tells us that we can always find solitude in our own minds. If our minds are serene, we will find peace and happiness. As for how others view us, we have little control over this. But virtue is still virtue even if it isn’t acknowledged. Remember, our lives are ephemeral, one day we live, the next we are dead. So act virtuous, use your time well, and be cheerful. Then, when you drop from life’s tree, you will drop like a ripe fruit.

In Book V Aurelius says we should get up each morning and do good work. We should act naturally and contribute to society, unconcerned about the reproach of others. And don’t ask or expect payment or gratitude for doing good deeds. Instead, be satisfied with being like a vine that bears good fruit. Virtue is its own reward.

In Book V Aurelius disavows revenge—better not to imitate injury. We should do our duty, act righteously and not be disturbed by the rest, for in the vastness of space and time we are insignificant. Think of good things and control your mind.

In Book VII Aurelius advocates patience and tolerance. Nature works like wax, continually transforming—so be patient. People will speak ill of you no matter what you do, but be tolerant. Evil people try our patience and tolerance, but we can remain happy by controlling our response to them.

In Book VIII Aurelius argues that being disconnected from humanity is like cutting off one of your own limbs. Instead, live connected to nature and other people. No matter what you encounter maintain a moderate and controlled mind. If you are cursed by others, don’t let it affect you any more than your cursing the spring affects the springtime.

In Books IX, X, and XI Aurelius argues that we should be moderate, sincere, honest, and calm. If someone reports that you are not virtuous, dispel such notions with your probity, and use humor to disarm the worst people.

In Books XII Aurelius asks why we love ourselves best, but so often value the opinion of others over our own. This is a mistake. Remember too that the destiny of the greatest and worst of human beings is the same—they all turn to ashes. Do not then be proud, but be humble. Die in serenity. As Aurelius wrote from his tent, far from home and never to return: “Life is warfare and a stranger’s sojourn, and after fame, oblivion.”

Reflections – I want to learn more about Stoicism, Buddhism, and other practical philosophies. I think there is a hunger today for practical philosophies of life, especially in the modern world where religious stories no longer provide comfort to so many. For more on Stoic philosophy see my posts on: Seneca, Cicero, the Stoics on emotions, and how Epictetus helped Admiral James Stockdale endure more than seven years as a prisoner of war.

Scheffler’s “Death and the Aferlife”

In the recent book, Death and the Afterlife, Samuel Scheffler offer two imaginative thought experiments in an attempt to understand our attitudes toward death and meaning.

In the first, the doomsday scenario, we are asked to imagine that we will live out our normal lifespan, but that thirty days after our deaths an asteroid will destroy the earth and all life on it. Needless to say, most of us would find this a depressing prospect, independent of the fact that we would not die prematurely. Scheffler argues that this shows that the lives of others who live on after we die, what he calls the “collective afterlife,” matter more to us than we ordinarily think and that our individual survival matters less to us than we normally suppose.

In the second, the infertility scenario, we again live out our normal lives but must do so with the knowledge that the species is infertile. With the last human death, humanity dies out. Scheffler argues that this knowledge would demoralize us, undermining our attempt to live happy lives. Again we see that the collective afterlife is more important to us than we usually realize.

Scheffler then contrasts the relative calm we feel about the fact that all those now living will one day be dead, with the horror we experience thinking about either of the above scenarios. This suggests that the fact that we and those we love won’t exist in the future bothers us less than that some unknown people won’t exist in the future. As Scheffler says:

the coming into existence of people we do not know and love matters more to us than our own survival and the survival of the people we do know and love. . . . This is a remarkable fact which should get more attention than it does in thinking about the nature and limits of our personal egoism.

MARK JOHNSTON REPLIES

But is it true that we really care more about potential people in the future than our loved ones now? This idea was challenged in a piece in the January 02, 2014  edition of the Boston Review by Mark Johnston entitled, “Is Life a Ponzi Scheme? Johnston asks us to imagine that the population of our tribe is half of humanity, and our tribe is also infertile. Would we really prefer the death of our tribe if we knew that the remaining half of humanity will repopulate the planet to its previous levels in a few generations, and then all of them will die a few generations later? Johnston thinks most of us would answer no to this question, and that his thought experiment belies Scheffler’s claim that we care more about unknown future persons than our present loved ones.

Johnston also argues that it is not just any future for humanity that matters to us, but rather valuable ones. Thus a future in which gangs fight for cosmic space or we are food for aliens is not better than one in which we all perished. Johnston prefers we perish rather than suffer such terrible fates. This leads him to consider whether our lives have meaning if
a) humanity has any future or; b) humanity has a valuable future. The problem with either of these is that if value depends on the future, then value will eventually be undermined—since the universe will ultimately end.

To avoid such a depressing conclusion Johnston advises us to value our lives now rather than holding them hostage to some future. And we should not be demoralized by the thought of our own or humanity’s death: “The kind of value that properly calls forth joy is not something that waits to be validated by the collective life to come. As a consequence, we already live in a rich ecology of value that surrounds us here and now, no matter what happens in the future.”

MESSERLY REPLIES

I challenged Johnston’s views in my recent book: The Meaning of Life: Religious, Philosophical, Transhumanist, and Scientific Perspectives. There I argue that what I call complete meaning is not possible without (individual/collective) immortality. That is not to say that mortal beings can’t live meaningful lives, just that they would be completely meaningful only if they possessed both infinite quantity and quantity—only if they didn’t end. In my view this is possible because future technologies may make death optional and grant us immortality if we so choose.

This argument for immortality provided by future technologies is buttressed by Scheffler’s insight that we care about the future of our descendants. We care about the future because if there is no future then life is (nearly) pointless. Johnston is right that futurity can’t provide meaning if there is no future, and in that case, all we can do is value the present as he counsels. But if there is a future of value and meaning—brought about by science and technology—then our role in bringing about that future gives life meaning. As for the eventual death of the universe, this too is uncertain given considerations of the multiverse, and the possibility of advanced intelligence determining the fate if the universe when they become sufficiently powerful.

Without the prospect of a good and lasting future for our descendants, there is little or no meaning to our present lives. This is what Scheffler’s thought experiments so beautifully and artfully illuminate.

Death and the Afterlife