The Meaning of Life

by Alfred Jules Ayer

Essays and lectures from each portion of the author's career as a philospher cover his views on logical positivism

Genres: Philosophy

224 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

In 1910, Sir Alfred Jules Ayer was born in London into a wealthy family. His father was a Swiss Calvinist and his mother was of Dutch-Jewish ancestry. Ayer attended Eton College and studied philosophy and Greek at Oxford University. From 1946 to 1959, he taught philosophy at University College London. He then became Wykeham Professor of Logic at the University of Oxford. Ayer was knighted in 1970. Included among his many works are The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge (1940), The Problem of Knowledge (1956), The Origins of Pragmatism (1968), Metaphysics and Common Sense (1969), Bertrand Russell (1972) and Hume (1980), about philosopher David Hume. Later in life, Ayer frequently identified himself as an atheist and became active in humanist causes. He was the first vice president of the British Humanist Association and served as its president from 1965 to 1970. He was an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Press Association from 1947 until his death. He was also an honorary member of the Bertrand Russell. In 1988, Ayer had a near-death experience in the United States after choking on salmon and subsequently losing consciousness. He wrote of his experience in “That Undiscovered Country” (New Humanist, May 1989): “My recent experiences have slightly weakened my conviction that my genuine death, which is due fairly soon, will be the end of me, though I continue to hope that it will be. They have not weakened my conviction that there is no god. I trust that my remaining an atheist will allay the anxieties of my fellow supporters of the British Humanist Association, the Rationalist Press Association and the South Place Ethical Society.” He died shortly after at age 78 in London. D. 1989.

More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._J._Ayer

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ayer/

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/t...

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytho/AyerbyT...

http://badassphilosophers.tumblr.com/...

http://www.informationphilosopher.com...

Reviews

[J.D. Steens · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book is a collection of essays on various topics (roughly, a series of “end-of-life” philosophical reflections).

Ayer hits the naturalistic fallacy hard. He says that one cannot logically derive an ought imperative from a factual statement. His objection to “moralists is simply that they fall into the logical error of confusing normative judgments of value with scientific statements of fact.” That’s true, but so what? Life runs on value. A doctor who diagnoses a malady (fact) doesn’t decline treatment because logic prohibits it.*

There are three other problems with Ayer's approach. First, he removes biological science (facts) from ethics (values). Biology he says can never provide philosophical guidance on what we ought to do and ought not to do. Ayer thereby removes chains of logic that can flow out of Darwinian evolutionary theory. If, for example, we are pursuers of self-interest (fact: survival and all of that), what are the consequences of such pursuits for others (fact: for our personal and tribal attachments to others, and the rebounding effect on our own self-interest)? If freedom is necessary for biological survival, is it a fact or a value (and more generally, are means to ends facts or values)? If we value freedom, why do we? Might the answer constitute a biological fact?

Second, Ayer kicks ethical (and political value) issues out of philosophy when it is perhaps he who should be kicked out of philosophy, as a syllogism might suggest: Science deals with fact/ philosophy goes beyond fact/ Ayer deals with fact/therefore Ayer is a scientist (of sorts), not a philosopher. Philosophy can be and should be informed by science. But it can and should move beyond science and explore alternatives or construct worldviews that make sense, but this Ayer does not allow. Perhaps one of the first philosophical acts is to destroy his stop sign, this absolute prohibition, that Ayer and others impose on philosophy, so that science can be applied to moral values.

Third, having removed value from philosophy turns Ayer into what? A utilitarian existentialist who is not a philosopher? As values are not true or false, Ayer creates his own meaning. In theory, one can kill or love. There’s no difference between the two, logically, though Ayer disclaims moral nihilism. “I am not endorsing any moral principle that anybody happens to hold,” he states, “still less alleging that all actions are morally neutral. On the contrary, I have strong moral sentiments….” But so did Hitler and Pol Pot. Ayer has it both ways – he’s philosophically value-free yet he still holds a philosophical position, even if it’s a “moral sentiment.”

And what might that position be? Why, of course, it's good things. It’s “moral progress,” it’s “universal brotherhood” and “the humanist outlook” based on an understanding that “if the capacity for evil is part of human nature, so is the capacity for good.” Well, ironically given his interest in language analysis, Ayer intersects these age-old philosophical questions through the back door without definition but, logically, philosophically, his position is no different than Hitler’s good (extermination of Jews and Gypsies and the deformed). In elaborating on his non-philosophical stance, Ayer claims “that when it comes to the conduct of life, each one of us has to decide what ends he thinks it right to pursue and what principles he is prepared to stand by.” While some may see this as a formula for power politics and a free-for-all, Ayer disagrees: “I think that it is morally incumbent upon humanists to do everything in their power to bring about the material and social conditions in which the great majority of people will have a fair opportunity of finding satisfaction in their lives.” Here Ayer must be a non-philosophical utilitarian.**

In another chapter, Ayer and Father Copleston (author of the multi-volume history of Western philosophy) debate logical positivism and now Ayer comes off far more reasonably, both in what he allows for philosophy (“To say that philosophy begins where science leaves off is perfectly all right if you mean that the philosopher takes the results of the scientist, analyzes them, shows the logical connection of one proposition with another, and so on.”) and in his criticism that Copleston’s claim for a transcendent realm of truth goes too far. Copleston says in contrast that the role of the philosopher is “to reveal the limits of science as a complete and exhaustive description and analysis of reality.” He asserts that a “metaphenomenal reality” exists which is an “intelligible structure of reality in so far as it is not amenable to the investigation by the methods of empirical science.”***

What is disturbing is that Copleston removes his position from fair debate when he states that “when I refer to a metaphysical reality in our present discussion, I mean a being which in principle, and not merely in fact, transcends the sphere of what can be sensibly experienced. Thus God is a metaphysical reality. Since God is ex hypothesi immaterial, He cannot in principle be apprehended by the senses.” This is the equivalent of stating that something is true because one says so. Debate goes only so far in that kind of context. This mode of argument says that since you cannot disprove it, it’s true if one believes it to be so. Since it’s based on a faith of sorts, it is interesting to speculate why Copleston and others are inclined to believe the way they do (e.g., need for an alpha father figure, a need to counter fear, a need to survive beyond the grave).

*Copleston’s makes a point that Ayer's underlying methodological position presumes a preferred value position. See the second paragraph of the third footnote below.

**Ayer seems aligned with Russell and G.E. Moore. Writing of Bertrand Russell, Ayer states that, “Like Moore he held that good is an indefinable non-natural quality, the presence of which is discoverable by intuition, that the objectively right action is the one, out of all the actions open to the agent, that will have the best consequences, in the sense that it will lead to the greatest favourable, or least unfavourable, ratio of good to evil, and that the action which one ought to do is that which appears most likely to have the best consequences.”

***Ayer states of the logical positivist that “we reject metaphysics, if this be understood, as I think it commonly has been, as an attempt to gain knowledge about the world by nonscientific means. In as much as metaphysical statements are not testable by observation we hold they are not descriptive of anything.” Good, so far, but then Ayer delimits the philosophical endeavor to “a cognitive activity” that takes “the form of trying to elucidate the concepts that were used in science or mathematics or in everyday language.” This is like doing philosophy on a treadmill. It’s boring. It’s void of soul.

Copleston’s rebuttal (to Ayer) is also worth noting: “If you (Ayer) say that any factual statement, in order to be meaningful, must be verifiable, and if you mean by ‘verifiable’ verifiable by sense experience, then surely you are presupposing that all reality is given in sense experience. If you are presupposing this, you are presupposing that there can be no such thing as a metaphysical reality. And if you presuppose this, you are presupposing a philosophical position which cannot be demonstrated by the principle of verification. It seems to me that logical positivism claims to to what I might call a ‘neutral’ technique, whereas in reality it presupposes the truth of positivism. Please pardon my saying so, but it looks to me as though the principle of verifiability were excogitated partly in order to exclude metaphysical propositions from the range of meaningful propositions.”