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He admits that he stands at a certain point on a curve that he acknowledges having to travel to its end. He belongs to time, and by the horror that seizes him, he recognizes his worst enemy. Tomorrow, he was longing for tomorrow, whereas everything in him ought to reject it. That revolt of the flesh is the absurd.
Plato’s Republic is a dialogue about the role of justice in the best human life. In the Nicomachean Ethics, named for his son, Nicomachus, Aristotle argued that a good life is one of virtuous activity in accordance with reason. His word for happiness or human flourishing, “eudaimonia,” has been adopted by psychologists who distinguish self-realization or “eudaimonic well-being” from “hedonic well-being” or the experience of pleasure.33 But what appears in this literature is a dismal caricature;
Mill’s insight in this passage has a name: the paradox of egoism. And it has a history, dating back at least to sermons preached by Joseph Butler at the Rolls Chapel in London, which were published as a book in 1726.9 An Anglican priest, Bishop Butler believed that egoism, or the exclusive pursuit of one’s own happiness, would not only interfere with but logically preclude its own achievement.
mean the alleged paradox of understanding how altruistic behavior is even possible, but the previously unnamed paradox implicit in Jackie Robinson’s aphorism, “A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.”12 The young Mill might have agreed. But the idea is ultimately incoherent.
defect that disturbed both Aristotle and John Stuart Mill: it can be crowded with demands, with bills to pay, mouths to feed, problems to solve, preoccupied by “struggle and privation.”35 Think of the days on which you have nothing to look forward to but sleep: a respite from childcare, putting out fires at work, fighting to keep your relationships alive. Don’t get me wrong, these things all matter. Their value may be final; but it is essentially ameliorative. Caught on the treadmill of what has to be done, day by day, you may not have time for what you want but do not need. In the words of
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This is what you ask yourself when you lose all conception of what is worth doing except to prevent things from going wrong or make them right. It is a variation on Mill’s question. “Work, worry, toil and trouble”: unavoidable, sure, but is that all there is?
Crises of this kind come by degree; they rise and fall. Your life may be more or less consumed by amelioration, more or less awash with needs. There may be pockets of leisure in which to breathe. Or the crisis may emerge as demands on your time recede—perhaps the kids are growing up—and you realize the void, your days no longer filled by what must be done, though there is not much else to do. This is one version of the midlife crisis. Like Mill’s nervous breakdown, it is not nihilistic. It turns on the grinding necessity of work, not the absence of value from the world.
Hence the second rule: in your job, your relationships, your spare time, you must make room for activities with existential value.
to think of human things, and, being mortal, of mortal things, but must, so far as we can, make ourselves immortal, and strain every nerve to live in accordance with the best thing in us; for even if it be small in bulk, much more does it in power and worth surpass everything.40
If you have the opportunity, you should make yourself immortal, some of the time.
You should have waited, but you are glad you didn’t. What explains, what justifies, this shift in attitude? There is no great mystery. It is the existence of your child that makes the difference. You love your son, who is happy to be alive; and if you had waited, he would never have been born.
According to British philosopher Bernard Williams, the threat of immortality is boredom: bitter, excruciating, hopeless—not the kind that gives way to constant bliss.
every novel, play, or film about living forever is a dystopia. Beauvoir wrote one of these herself: All Men Are Mortal, in which the struggles of a disaffected actress are set against the
Suppose you do get what you want, your desire at last fulfilled. You should be delighted. Instead you are aimless and depressed. Your pursuit is over and you have nothing to do. Life needs direction.
We can escape the self-destructive cycle of pursuit, resolution, and renewal, of attainments archived or unachieved.
The Bhagavad Gita, a dialogue between warrior-prince Arjuna and his divine charioteer, Lord Krishna, which Schopenhauer read some time in 1813 or 1814, offers what is arguably a radical exhortation to the atelic attitude: “motive should never be in the fruits of action, / nor should you cling to inaction.
to be indifferent to success in getting things done, to care only about the process, not the project. That is a harder line than my advice to value the atelic without denying that the outcome matters.
Buddhism of the Four Noble Truths: life is suffering; the source of suffering is attachment; the goal is to give it up; and the way to do so is the Eightfold Path.
But it is in the fourth noble truth that we find the origins of mindfulness, the idea of a way toward the end of suffering that works through meditation on the present. How similar is this idea to the ones developed above?
It is the sustained delusion of one’s own enduring substance that feeds aversion and desire. Meditation for serenity (“samatha”) is carefully distinguished from meditation for insight (“vipassana”): that I do not exist is the insight that brings suffering to an end.22 There are stages to the meditative process,
The denial of “self” challenges only the notion of a static self independent of body and mind—not the ordinary sense of oneself as a person distinct from everyone else. This notion of a static self is the primary obstruction to the realization of our unique potential as an individual being. By dissolving this fiction through a centered vision of the transiency, ambiguity, and contingency of experience, we are freed to create ourself anew.
“In the Now, in the absence of time, all your problems dissolve. . . . You cannot be both unhappy and fully present in the Now.”33 If only it were true—if it did not matter what the present holds, only that you be open to it. But that is wishful thinking.
