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April 25 - November 13, 2018
We are born, we live, we suffer along the way, and then we die—obliterated for the rest of eternity. Our existence is but a blip in cosmic time and space. It is not surprising that so many people ask: “What is it all about?” The right answer, I argue in this book, is “ultimately nothing.” Despite some limited consolations, the human condition is in fact a tragic predicament from which none of us can escape, for the predicament consists not merely in life but also in death.
“The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.”
There is no great mystery, but there is plenty of horror. It is for this reason that I think that the “human condition” is most accurately described as the “human predicament.” Nor is it the case that those who are thrust into this predicament can avoid the horror of it. Limited melioration is sometimes possible, but this is the existential equivalent of palliative care. It addresses some symptoms but not the underlying problem and not without costs.
Contrary to the views of some aggressive atheists, I do not think that religious views are inherently more dangerous than secular ones. There are many examples of religious people who are tolerant, kind, and compassionate. There are also many examples of committed atheists causing vast amounts of suffering and death, often in pursuit of some secular utopia. These include Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, the Kim dynasty in North Korea, and other devout adherents of atheistic ideologies.
However intense and whatever the duration, the concern is about one’s insignificance or the pointlessness of one’s life. This thought often arises from a sense of one’s extreme limitedness in both time and space. We are ephemeral beings on a tiny planet in one of hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe (or perhaps the multiverse)—a cosmos that is coldly indifferent to the insignificant specks that we are.1 It is indifferent to our fortunes and misfortunes, to injustice, to our hopes, fears, values, and concerns. The forces of nature and the cosmos are blind.
Moreover, it is thought that there is something absurd about the earnestness of our pursuits. We take ourselves very seriously, but when we step back, we wonder what it is all about. The step back need not be all the way to the cosmos. One does not need much distance to see that there seems something futile about our endless strivings, which are not altogether different from a hamster on its wheel. Much of our lives are filled with recurring mundane activities, the purpose of which is to keep the whole cycle going: working, shopping, cooking, feeding, abluting, sleeping, laundering,
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Yet there are some who believe that all this pessimism is not warranted. My own view is that a deep pessimism about the meaning of life is entirely appropriate, but that this should not be confused with total nihilism about meaning in life. More specifically, we should, as I argue in chapter 3, be nihilistic about an important kind of meaning in life, but, as I argue in the rest of this chapter, there are other kinds of meaning that are attainable with varying frequency and to varying degrees.
Put another way, meaning, as a number of authors have suggested, is about “transcending limits.” A meaningful life is one that transcends one’s own limits and significantly impacts others or serves purposes beyond oneself.
Moreover, if by quality of life, one means its felt quality, then it is entirely possible for a life that objectively lacks meaning to have a good subjective quality, either because the subject does not care about meaning or mistakenly thinks that his11 life is meaningful. By contrast, when people perceive their lives to be meaningless, there are typically quite profound negative effects on the quality of life.
Thus, the somewhat good news is that our lives can be meaningful—from some perspectives. One reason that this is only somewhat good news is that even by the more limited standards, there are some people whose lives either are or feel meaningless. Moreover, the prospects for meaning generally diminish as the scope of the perspective broadens. That the prospects tend to diminish in this way does not imply that lives that are meaningless from a more limited perspective are never meaningful from a broader perspective. There are those, for example, who have no family left or who have no meaning for
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Another reason why the news so far has been only somewhat good is that even those whose lives have meaning from more expansive terrestrial perspectives are rarely satisfied with the amount of meaning their lives have. Not only do people typically want more meaning than they can get, but the most meaning that anybody is capable of attaining is inevitably significantly limited. It is to this bad news that I turn in the next chapter
Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5
However, human nature tends to abhor a meaning vacuum—horror vacui. There are strong psychological impulses that impel most but not all people to cope with this, either by denying the vacuum or by denying its importance.
Nature, however, has no goals. It is a blind process that unfolds without any end in mind. It neither intends our existence nor has any goal at which our existence is aimed.
Nature might help us explain our existence, but that explanation is a causal one rather than a purposive one.26 It imputes no purposes, at least not in a literal sense, to anybody or anything. It merely provides an explanation of how rather than why we came to exist.27
It is true, of course, that many (but by no means all) of us were brought into existence for a creator-endowed purpose. The relevant creators were our parents.28 They might have created us for any number of purposes—to fulfill their desires for genetic offspring, to have a child to rear, to silence their parents’ pleas for grandchildren, to pass on particular values or ways of life, or to contribute to the survival or growth of an ethnic or national group, for example. However, these are the purposes of our parents rather than of nature. Nor are they purposes of cosmic significance.
Guy Kahane’s argument takes the following form: 1.We possess value. 2.If there is no other life in the universe, then nothing else has value. 3.If nothing else has value, then we possess the most value. 4.Therefore, if there is no other life in the universe, we have immense cosmic significance.29
The whole project of transcendence makes sense only if one is limited.
Meaning from the cosmic perspective would be good for extensions of the same reasons that meaning from the other perspectives is good. People, quite reasonably, want to matter. They do not want to be insignificant or pointless. Life is tough. It is full of striving and struggle; there is much suffering and then we die. It is entirely reasonable to want there to be some point to the entire saga. The bits of terrestrial meaning we can attain are important, for without them, our lives would be not only meaningless but also miserable and unbearable. It would be hard to get up each day and do the
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Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist who survived various concentration camps, including Auschwitz, highlighted the importance of meaning—or, more accurately, perceived meaning.62 Writing of his experiences during the Holocaust, he argued that meaning was crucial to survival.
He says that “Nietzsche’s words ‘He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how’ could be the guiding motto for all psychotherapeutic and psychohygienic efforts regarding prisoners.”64
If there is no point to the species and each one of us is but a cog in the machinery of a pointless enterprise, then there is a serious deficit of meaning even if our lives are not without some (terrestrial) meaning. The terrestrial meaning is good, but the absence of cosmic meaning is bad.
The other kind of mistake is to think that because we are cosmically insignificant, “nothing matters,” where the implication is that nothing matters from any perspective. If we lack cosmic meaning but have other kinds of meaning, then some things do matter, even though they only matter from some perspectives. It does make a difference, for example, whether or not one is adding to the vast amounts of harm on earth, even though that makes no difference to the rest of the cosmos.
We are nonetheless warranted in regretting our cosmic insignificance and the pointlessness of the entire human endeavor.67 As impressed as (some) humans often are about the significance of humanity’s presence in the cosmos, our absence would have made absolutely no difference to the rest of the universe.68 We serve no purpose in the cosmos and, although our efforts have some significance here and now, it is seriously limited both spatially and temporally. Even those who think that we ought not to yearn for the greater meaning that is unattainable must recognize the immense tragedy of beings
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What a distance there is between our beginning and our end! The one, the madness of desire and the seduction of voluptuousness; the other, the destruction of all our organs and the fetid odour of decaying cadavers. Moreover, the road of well-being between the one and the other goes ever downwards: the blessed, dreaming childhood, happy youth, the tribulations of those in their prime, frail and often pathetic old age, the torment of the last illness, and finally the agony of dying. Therefore does it not seem that Being is a misstep … ? —ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER Parerga und Paralipomena: Kleine
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Both the deficiency of meaning and the poor quality of life are features of the human predicament.
However, on at least some views, a life can have great (terrestrial) meaning despite the life’s quality being poor. The incarceration of Nelson Mandela, for example, radically reduced the quality of his life, but in time, it added immense meaning. It is a cruel irony that meaning in life can actually be enhanced by events that cause a reduction in (other aspects of) the quality of life, as was arguably the case with Mr. Mandela. His imprisonment and the associated hardships and indignities
The common view, however, is that the quality of some lives qualifies as bad and the quality of others qualifies as good. In contrast to this view, I believe that while some lives are better than others, none are (noncomparatively or objectively) good.
We are vulnerable to innumerable appalling fates. Although each fate does not befall every one of us, our very existence puts us at risk for these outcomes, and the cumulative risk of something horrific occurring to each one of us is simply enormous. If we include death, as I argue in the next chapter that we ought to do, then the risk is in fact a certainty.
Thereafter, from one’s early twenties and on, one begins the long, slow decline. Some of the mental decline is masked and counteracted by hard work or by increasing wisdom. Thus, at least in some areas of pursuit (but not others), people do not reach their professional or overall mental peaks until later in life. However, there is an underlying decline, at least physically and to some extent also mentally: Hair turns gray or begins to fall out; wrinkles begin to appear and various body parts sag; muscle gives way to fat, as strength does to weakness; and eyesight and hearing begin to fail.37
Things are also stacked against us in the fulfillment of our desires and the satisfaction of our preferences.38 Many of our desires are never fulfilled. There are thus more unfulfilled than fulfilled desires. Even when desires are fulfilled, they are not fulfilled immediately. Thus, there is a period during which those desires remain unfulfilled. Sometimes, that is a relatively short period (such as between thirst and, in ordinary circumstances, its quenching), but in the case of more ambitious desires, they can take months, years, or decades to fulfill. Some desires that are fulfilled prove
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Life is thus a constant state of striving. There are sometimes reprieves, but the striving ends only with the end of life. Moreover, as should be obvious, the striving is to ward off bad things and attain good things. Indeed, some of the good things amount merely to the temporary relief from the bad things. For example, one satisfies one’s hunger or quenches one’s thirst. Notice too that while the bad things come without any effort, one has to strive to ward them off and attain the good things. Ignorance, for example, is effortless, but knowledge usually requires hard work.
It is not surprising that we fail to notice this heavy preponderance of bad in human life. The facts I have described are deep and intractable features of human (and other) life. Most humans have accommodated to the human condition and thus fail to notice just how bad it is. Their expectations and evaluations are rooted in this unfortunate baseline. Longevity, for example, is judged relative to the longest actual human lifespans and not relative to an ideal standard. The same is true of knowledge, understanding, moral goodness, and aesthetic appreciation. Similarly, we expect recovery to take
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The optimistic delusions to which humans are prone do make the quality of human life a little less bad than it otherwise would be. In this way, they partially palliate the human predicament—or at least they do so for those who have them. The quality of life just does not feel quite as bad as it would in the absence of the rose-colored glasses. I shall say more in the concluding chapter about whether this supports an argument for an optimistic response to the human predicament. For now, we need note only that to palliate a predicament is not to elude it. Even armed with various optimistic
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The certain prospect of death dooms us to destruction. That makes death sound like a part of the human predicament. Some might wonder how that could be so if, as I have argued, the human predicament includes the poor quality of human life and our cosmic insignificance. If living a life of that kind is a predicament, why is the end of that life not deliverance from the predicament?
One reason is the intractability of real predicaments, of which the human predicament may well be the paradigmatic example. If one is in a predicament from which there is a costless (or a low-cost) escape, one is not really in a predicament. If, for example, one is up a creek without a paddle but one does have an outboard motor, then being up a creek without a paddle is not a real predicament. Real predicaments—the wrenching ones—are those in which there is no easy solution. Death might deliver us from suffering, but annihilation, as I shall argue, is an extremely costly “solution” and thus
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There is, however, an ancient philosophical challenge to the widespread view that death is bad. According to this challenge, first advanced by the Epicureans (and which I shall therefore call Epicurean arguments) but developed by subsequent philosophers, death is not bad for the person who dies.
Whichever view one takes of wellbeing, death is bad, according to the deprivation account, because it deprives the person who dies of the good that further life would have contained. Sometimes, however, a longer life would either have contained no good or it would have contained so much bad that any good would have been outweighed. In such circumstances, the deprivation account implies that death is not bad—or at least not bad all things considered.
Instead, the suggestion is only that, in dying, one loses not only whatever good that would otherwise have been in one’s future, but also one’s continued existence, in which one has an independent interest.
“Priorism”: If it seems strange to say that death is bad for Beth at a time she no longer exists, one might be tempted to an alternative position, according to which death is bad for Beth before she dies.21 However, that also seems strange, for how can something that happens later be bad for somebody who existed earlier? Some have suggested that this view commits one to a dubious metaphysical claim of “backward causation”—something earlier being caused by something later.
In other words, my view parallels ordinary cases of bad in all respects except one. The one respect in which it differs is the one respect in which death33 differs from ordinary bads. It denies that a person must exist at the time he is dead in order for death to be bad for that person. The reason why death is bad for that person is precisely because it ends his existence and deprives him of all the good he would have had if he had continued existing. The view involves no “backward causation” because whatever it is that brings about the being’s death causes the annihilation and subsequent
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That response is highly implausible. Lucretius is entirely correct in taking pre-vital existence not to be bad. His mistake lies in his assumption of evaluative symmetry between the two periods of nonexistence. There are crucial differences between these two periods that should lead us to think that only postmortem nonexistence is bad.
However, when somebody is concerned about his death, he is typically concerned about the end of his “conscious personal existence”38 (that is, about the end of the being with his memories, consciousness, attachments, values, beliefs, desires, goals, and perspectives). Thus, the concern is about the end of a person understood in this thick way.
There is a further way in which pre-vital and postmortem nonexistence are not symmetrical. Death, as I argued earlier, is bad not merely because it deprives, but also because it annihilates. Pre-vital nonexistence does not—and could not possibly—annihilate.
Some may wonder how two of my views can be reconciled: How can it be better never to have come into existence but also be a bad to cease to exist? One reason it is better never to come into existence is that one does not face annihilation. Never existing does not carry that cost, but ceasing to exist does. Existence also carries innumerable other costs. These include various assaults on the quality of life (discussed in chapter 4), as well as the absence of meaningfulness to varying degrees (discussed in chapter 3). There is invulnerability to all of those if one never exists. By coming into
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We have very strong prima facie reasons for thinking that death is bad for the person who dies—and some powerful arguments to support this. If we encounter an argument that suggests otherwise, we have more reason to think that we are dealing with a philosophical puzzle to which we cannot find a definitive solution than that the argument actually establishes the conclusion.
By contrast, the conclusion that coming into existence is (very) bad, although disruptive of ordinary views about procreation, is actually entirely congruent with our other views about what is bad. We think it is bad to endure pain, suffering, frustration, sadness, trauma, to be betrayed, discredited, and to die. Coming into existence is the enabling condition for all these bad things and the guarantor of many of them.44 Thus, the view that it is bad to be (vulnerable to such fates) is actually not at all surprising.
The implication of this is that death at the early stages of existence is less bad than it is later. It becomes worse as the psychological properties of a person develop, because these properties create psychological unity with the future self whom death deprives of various goods. Then, as one ages beyond one’s prime, the badness of death gradually diminishes, not because of a lack of psychological unity, but rather because death deprives one of less.
kind of existence we have an interest in continuing is existence as a person. This in turn requires sentience and sapience, both of which emerge slowly and in degrees after the human organism has already come into existence.
Epicurus and Lucretius argue that one should have an attitude of indifference to one’s own death. They were responding to the many people who have (often intensely) negative attitudes toward death. Among these negative attitudes are terror, fear, dread, sadness, and anxiety. But we should distinguish the question whether death is bad from questions about our attitudes toward death.
