Embodiment and the meaning of life 9780773553934, 0773553932, 9780773553941, 0773553940

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Do Suffering and Death Prove That Life Is Not Worth Living?
2 If Life Is Worth Living, Is It Worth Living Forever?
3 Time as Extrinsic Limit and Matrix of Freedom
4 Frames of Finitude and Non-alienated Labour I: Dependence, Disease, and Old Age
5 Frames of Finitude and Non-alienated Labour II: Relationships, Life-Projects, and Risk
6 Death and the Ethical Wholeness of Life
Conclusion: Tragedy and Life-Value
Notes
Bibliography
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
R
S
T
U
V
W
Z

Citation preview

Embodiment and the Meaning of Life

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Embodiment and the

Meaning of

Life J E F F N O O NA N

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2018 isbn isbn isbn isbn

978-0-7735-5348-4 (cloth) 978-0-7735-5349-1 (paper) 978-0-7735-5393-4 (epdf) 978-0-7735-5394-1 (epub)

Legal deposit second quarter 2018 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Funding was also received from the University of Windsor.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil a investi 153 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Noonan, Jeff, author Embodiment and the meaning of life / Jeff Noonan. Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. isbn 978-0-7735-5348-4 (cloth).–isbn 978-0-7735-5349-1 (paper). isbn 978-0-7735-5393-4 (epdf).–isbn 978-0-7735-5394-1 (epub) 1. Life. 2. Meaning (Philosophy). 3. Suffering. 4. Death. I. Title. bd431.n66 2018

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c2017-907443-1 c2017-907444-x

See how they hurry to enter their bodies, these spirits. Is it better, flesh, that they should hurry so? Jorie Graham, “At Luca Signorelli’s Resurrection of the Body”

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Contents Preface / ix Acknowledgments / xiii Introduction / 3

1 Do Suffering and Death Prove That Life Is Not Worth Living? / 9

2 If Life Is Worth Living, Is It Worth Living Forever? / 40

3 Time as Extrinsic Limit and Matrix of Freedom / 76

4 Frames of Finitude and Non-alienated Labour I: Dependence, Disease, and Old Age / 114

5 Frames of Finitude and Non-alienated Labour II: Relationships, Life-Projects, and Risk / 145

6 Death and the Ethical Wholeness of Life / 180 Conclusion: Tragedy and Life-Value / 214 Notes / 225 Bibliography / 243 Index / 257

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Preface

The arguments that I will develop in this book were implied but left unexplored in my previous work, Materialist Ethics and Life-Value, where I argued that the goodness of human life depended upon the universal and comprehensive satisfaction of fundamental naturalorganic, socio-cultural, and temporal life-requirements. The satisfaction of these life-requirements enables individuals to realize their lifecapacities for sentient experience, imaginative and conceptual thought, mutualistic relationship, and creative practice in ways that are good: meaningful and enjoyable for the self and valuable to and valued by others. My materialist conception of the good was an attempt to apply John McMurtry’s primary and universal axiom of value to the problem of specifically human life, while at the same time trying to free the ethical implications of materialism from hedonistic individualism on the one hand and undemocratic forms of socialism on the other. McMurtry’s axiom maintains that “X is value if and only if, and to the extent that, x consists in or enables a more coherently inclusive range of thought/feeling/action than without it.”1 In Materialist Ethics and Life-Value, I applied the axiom where these three ultimate fields of value are defined as thought = internal image and concept (T), feeling = the felt side of being (F) … action = animate movement (A) across species and organization to the interpretation of the unifying ground of struggles against various forms of systematic deprivation of life-requirements. It is the cornerstone of what he calls “life-value onto-axiology,” his attempt to demonstrate that all value whatsoever in the universe is grounded in the requirements and capacities of living things. My more restricted application of the principle to the problems of contemporary political life led to the conclusion that all struggles against oppression, exploitation, and alienation could be understood in a unified way as struggles for access

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to the material (natural and social) conditions of good human lives. Underneath the class politics of historical materialism lay this deeper and properly universal conception of the good for human beings: the free realization of our life capacities in ways that are individually meaningful, socially valuable, and environmentally sustainable. In order to achieve fully meaningful and good lives, people had to overcome the structural impediments to life-requirement satisfaction. As often happens in philosophy, clarity about one problem (the structural impediments to life-requirement satisfaction) brought another, deeper problem to light, which I did not fully comprehend at the time. What became clear to me in the course of reading the materialist traditions of Western philosophy was that materialism, as opposed to idealism, is best understood as a philosophy of limits. The materialist cannot coherently acknowledge the existence of any eternal order or meaning in life. Idealism postulates the existence of overarching governing universal purposes (like Plato’s Forms) or a ruling creator God of the monotheistic religions. For the materialist of whatever stripe (reductive-mechanical or historical), living things, in their practical and cognitive interactions with the world, do not discover any universal meaning to life but, first of all, only their own dependence upon other living things and the natural environment. If they are to continue to live they must obey the limits that their physical organism encodes. That is, they must find ways to satisfy their life-requirements, and in ways that do not destroy the source of those life-requirement satisfiers. Since human beings make the most extensive and intensive demands on their environment, it is essential for our survival that we learn how to limit those demands to what is sustainable over the long term. Since this imperative of sustainability (which we can interpret as one type of good limitation on our desires) collides with the hedonic egoism posited as good by capitalist society, I concluded that the social conditions for the realization of the universal good for human beings were incompatible with the particular system-good (accumulation of private money-value) of capitalism. The primary target of my criticism in Materialist Ethics and LifeValue was the ruling money-value system of global capitalism. The most difficult philosophical argument in Materialist Ethics and Life-Value concerned the proof that there was an internal and non-arbitrary

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connection between the subjective good for a finite, needy, mortal being and the objective limits set to individual desire and accumulation by the natural conditions of life-support and the morally equal life-interests of others. The argument turned on the claim that because people are not isolated monads but share natural and social worlds without which they can neither live nor live well, a materially rational understanding of the individual good led at the same time to the affirmation of a universal human good. Since materialist ethics was concerned with realizing the good and not only with defining it, its practical implication was the need for political struggle against all social impediments to life-requirement satisfaction and philosophical commitment to accepting the limits that the biosphere and others’ life-interests set around the forms of life it is materially rational to call good for individuals. Further reflection on the relationship between goodness, selfconstraint, and the ethical pull that other people’s life-interests exert on a socially self-conscious agent’s choices began to lead my thinking out of strictly political considerations and into the field of existential problems that first spurred me towards the study of philosophy three decades ago. While I always retained personal and teaching interests in this field of problems, my published work was dominated by issues of social philosophy and had not grappled with the existential problems in any systematic way. My reflection upon Materialist Ethics and Life-Value revealed them to be lurking just below explicit formulation, and I realized that the next step in the ongoing project of understanding human good from a materialist perspective demanded that they be brought into the open. The existential problems centre on the fact that the constraints on our capacity for life-valuable activity and experience are not only extrinsic (e.g., violence, poverty) but also intrinsic to the nature of human being (the frames around embodied existence noted above). Extrinsic limitations are limitations on our capacities for enjoyable and life-valuable self-realization that can be overcome by changed social relationships, institutions, and value systems. Intrinsic limitations, by contrast, are constitutive of our nature as finite embodied human beings and are not changed (or not changed fundamentally) by changed social relationships, institutions, and value systems. The

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potentially negative implications of the operation of these intrinsic limitations on our power to express and enjoy our life-capacities had escaped my notice up until this point. Then I realized that if good lives in general are defined by the enjoyed expression of life-capacities in life-valuable ways, and if dependence and interdependence, loss and failure, disease, and death are all intrinsic limitations on the extent to which individuals can express and enjoy their life-capacities, then it might follow that life is not good, no matter how successful political struggles against extrinsic impediments are. Hence I was led back from problems of social philosophy and ethics to the most fundamental existential question of all: in light of the apparently insurmountable barriers to full and free life-capacity expression and enjoyment, is life worth living, even in cases where all external obstacles have been overcome? This book is an attempt to answer that question and to explain, through the process of answering it, why those limits to the realization of any and all our desires – what I call the frames of our finitude – are actually essential to the good it is possible to realize in life.

Acknowledgments

An author needs an idea, but the book cannot be finished unless they learn to engage with and listen to supportive but critical readers. Gradually, over time, through a series of reversals and renewed advances, the book implicit in the idea takes concrete form – not the form initially imagined, but still the book one wanted to write. Its truth reveals itself in the process of working out the arguments. In the case of this book I thought I was writing a book about death, but as it progressed, it became clear that the guiding idea was really nonalienated labour: the way we produce meaning within the unavoidable constraints of embodied existence. I would never have seen this truth had it not been for opportunities to publicly think through my ideas with thoughtful and sympathetic, but equally critical, interlocutors. The idea came to life in two graduate seminars at the University of Windsor that I called “Time, Mortality, and the Human Good.” The students helped me see that what I was really interested in was not death as the end of life, but death as a spur to meaningful activity. Students in a third graduate seminar on Marx helped and pushed me to rethink certain aspects of historical materialism, in particular, the extent to which it can accommodate themes more usually associated with existentialism (finitude, the meaning of life in a meaningless material universe, meaning as the product of human labour, the tensions between a progressive philosophy of history and the persistence of suffering in human life). As they have for the past nineteen years, my colleagues in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Windsor challenged, supported, and inspired me. They make me want to be the best contributor I can be to our collective intellectual life and our standing in the wider philosophical world. Writing is a troubled pleasure, and as essential as it is to the life of philosophy, I believe that the real vital core of this discipline is

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public argument. I am grateful to Erica Stevens Abbitt, who, as director of the Humanities Research Group, invited me to present the ideas that became this book as part of the Martin Wesley Lecture Series. Analogous thanks are due to Niall Scott of the University of Central Lancashire, who invited me to speak there as a distinguished visiting speaker in 2013. Paul Reynolds arranged for me to speak at Edge Hill University on that same trip to the uk. My paper at the Critical Theory Roundtable at Loyola University in Chicago, also in 2013, helped bring the core argument of this book into keener focus. Thanks are also due to John McMurtry for more than two decades of pushing me to think through, think deeper, and express more clearly whatever it was I happened to be thinking. He also lent his sharpest of critical eyes to the text as it evolved. Giorgio Baruchello read key sections of the manuscript and offered important insights. My colleague Stephen Pender of the Department of English and Creative Writing shamed me into finally reading Milton, whose Paradise Lost became an important subject in chapter 1. Pender also read most of the manuscript with the combined virtues of poet and philosopher. The views on art that I articulate in chapter 5 have been shaped by three decades of sitting in the studio of one of Canada’s finest painters, John Brown, watching him work and discussing the history of artistic creation and the specificity of aesthetic form. Josie Watson served as my research assistant for part of the project, generously sharing her expertise in the social determinants of health and the physiology of stress. To all of these friends and colleagues, my deepest appreciation. One name signs the book, but many minds contribute to it. The team at McGill-Queen’s University Press has been, as usual, immensely supportive of my work. In particular, my editor, Khadija Coxon, deserves especial thanks for her sympathy for the project and tireless pushing to make me make it better. The dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Windsor, Marcello Guarini, and the vicepresident of research and innovation, Michael Siu, both provided crucial assistance at a key moment. This book is dedicated to the memory of my dearly missed friend and comrade Jim Donnelly: Here’s tae us, wha’s like us? Gey few, and they’re a’deid.

Embodiment and the Meaning of Life

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chapter 1

Introduction

Such scene of suffering, and of strife, O moon, this is our mortal life. In travail man is born; His birth too oft the cause of death, And with his earliest breath, he pain and torment feels. – Giacomo Leopardi, “Nightsong of a Shepherd Wandering in Asia”

Historians could hardly fault Leopardi for exaggerating life’s difficulties. How much more strife and pain do they find in the struggles of nations, cultures, and classes than in even the worst individual life? Even in those moments of collective triumph over oppression, in the joy of liberation or epochal achievement, the mortality of individuals rears up to rob the victors of savouring their victory. They may have overcome their enemy, but at the cost of piles of bodies that cannot experience the newly won freedom. Worse – even those who live to enjoy freedom today will be dead tomorrow, making the pleasure of all our earthly achievements ephemeral and hardly worth the effort. Worse still – across every epoch, and beneath public acknowledgment, is the daily grind of disappointment, failure, unrequited love, hatred, illness, pain, and death. To affirm the value of life in full consciousness of these realities seems not only naive but also immoral, the product of an aloof intellect’s indifference to the material realities of vulnerable, mortal human beings. And yet despite all the blood, pain, personal misery, and political violence, the overwhelming majority of people – even the poorest and most inhumanly deprived – struggle to keep living. It seems that to live is to affirm

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that life is worth living. Being consciously present for the world’s unfolding is a source of hope that feeds the desire to live, even in the most appalling of conditions. Philosophy must respect these facts of life, but cannot simply accept them as decisive. In all cases, philosophy is obliged to question the facts of life. In the deepest waters of the problems of loss, suffering, and death, there are two philosophically interesting questions: why should anyone affirm life’s goodness and hope for better? Is that affirmation rationally justifiable? This book raises these questions from the same perspective as every reflective individual who is awake to the sheer wonder of being alive but anxious about the present, sensitive to the possibility of damage, fearful of death. As I will suggest, the wonder that persists through pain is the sign that human life is good, not in spite of the limitations that define it, but because of them. In fact, I will argue that the meaning and good of human life depend on basic forms of human finitude: dependence on physical nature, vulnerability to disease and organic decline, interdependence, susceptibility to loss and failure, and finally death. These frames of finitude teach that, since our lives will end, and since there is no guarantee of a good life, we ought to work and struggle to make our lives good each moment of our existence. The next moment could be our last. I begin, however, from the opposite perspective, that of the philosophical pessimist. Chapter 1 considers the long tradition of poetic reflection and sober philosophical analysis that leads to the conclusion that the pains of life outweigh whatever good it also might contain to such an extent that life is not worth living. If one is happy now, calamity or death will soon ruin that happiness. As simple facts about life, these claims seem impossible to refute, and the fears they generate impossible to overcome. If true in the deeper existential sense the pessimists intend, not simply as abstract facts but as proofs felt in the most profound ways, they would undermine any defence of the value of life. The pessimists do not necessarily deny our wonder, or even joy, at being alive. They ask whether it is rational to accept these feelings. The power of pessimism lies in the emotional force of its questions and the unflinching rigour of its counterevidence to naive beliefs about the goodness of life. Nevertheless, it remains true that pes-

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simists have to live long enough to write their poems and books, and none of the major pessimistic artists and thinkers killed themselves. Thus, while I take the pessimists’ challenge seriously, their own commitment to reason, argument, and, yes, living life with all the problems they catalogue seems to speak against the soundness of their conclusions. What they really prove is not that life is not worth living, but the difference between historically specific, extrinsic causes of suffering that compromise life’s goodness, and limitations intrinsic to being an embodied mortal that make life hard but worthwhile. The latter can be either borne or used as motivation to achieve higher expressions of our core human capacities.1 Although these conditions of embodied mortal life cannot be changed, they can be rationally accepted as frames that condition the only sort of good it is possible for us humans to realize. I recognize that we live in an age liable to interpret my distinction between extrinsic causes of needless suffering and limitations intrinsic to being human as itself insufficiently optimistic. Chapter 2 will consider a growing body of technotopian and transhumanist philosophers and scientists for whom the distinction is both woollyminded and hopelessly outdated. They believe that science and technology confound conceptual differences between soluble problems of human life and unavoidable limitations: the latter simply do not yet have technological solutions. But wait, have hope, and save your money, because the needed “innovation” is surely just around the corner. Transhumanism is the intellectual fashion of our age; the expression of the highest scientific hopes of conquering all the obstacles to full, free, and above all happy life. Happiness demands life without impediments or intrinsic or extrinsic limitation. Practitioners of transhumanism describe it in terms of the ultimate in scientific faith, as “the intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition … to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities.”2 From this perspective, if one is willing and able to pay, science will eventually cure every existential challenge, including death. Unlike other world religions, transhumanism does not make eternal life contingent on spiritual effort. However, as I will argue, the very good the transhumanists

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seek to preserve depends on the effort it takes to maintain our urgent connections with nature and other people: the activities our embodied finitude requires. Transhumanism thus begins within a selfundermining onto-ethical confusion between the value proper to human life and machine functioning. If the project were to succeed, it would produce non-human entities, devoid of the good the project seeks to immortalize. Another way of understanding the point that finitude makes human beings meaningfully human is to acknowledge that we must live in time. Time is not simply a condition of human experience, as Kant maintained, nor a universal characteristic of a dynamic universe, as a physicist might say. Time is socially structured and experienced: different sets of institutions, value systems, and social forces structure time and the human experience of it differently. Recent developments in the organization of time have, I will contend in chapter 3, intensified the alienating effects of the capitalist organization of time, compromising the value of the lives we are able to live within it. These objective social, economic, and technological forces act as a powerful extrinsic constraint on valuable human experience and enjoyment and, as such, contribute to a pessimistic devaluation of life as it is. To be sure, this pessimism can be combatted by political movements that fight against the objective causes of alienated structures of time, but we cannot postpone living well until some ultimate revolutionary success. Hence, while struggling, we must also learn to live each moment as fully as possible. There is time enough for living well, if we push back the boundaries of alienated experience and activity and immerse ourselves fully in projects and experiences that make life meaningful. What are such projects and experiences? Chapters 4 and 5 answer this question by connecting what I have called the frames of finitude with non-alienated labour. We can think of the frames of finitude as challenges that motivate us to live well. Meaning is not something we find or discover, but something we make. We produce meaning through non-alienated labour – work that builds and maintains lifevaluable connections between the self and materially distinct things and people. Non-alienated labour produces what John McMurtry

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has called “collective life-capital,” the evolving set of resources and relationships that underlie, support, and sustain the human project over time: “The life wealth that produces more life wealth without loss and with cumulative gain. We defend it by life goods to ensure our life capacities are not reduced but grow through time. Most are unpriced – the sun and air, the learning, the home environment, the delight in nature, the play, the love, the raising of children, the fellow arts, and so on. On the social level, the same holds and any well-governed society provides for them in many ways.”3 The frames of finitude are necessary motivations for the non-alienated labour that produces this life-capital, and they establish the basis for the continuity of the human project over the open-ended future. Chapter 4 considers how we pursue non-alienated labour in the context of the frames of finitude that do not depend upon our choices: dependence on nature and our liability to disease and old age. Chapter 5 considers such pursuits through frames that do depend on our choices: interdependent relationships with other people and liability to failure. Still, even if the whole of a lifetime could be experienced as free, it will always contain unrealized potentialities. As the final chapter of this book will highlight, there is a gap between the materially possible and the imaginable. In a finite life, choices must be made which steer a person along one path and away from an unlimited set of other possibilities for life-valuable experience, relationships, and activity that the person could imagine it would have been good to choose. Death ensures that our choices cannot be endlessly revised and our identity – the person we made ourselves to be through the value-commitments that we formed and the projects that we undertook – will be fixed. The wholeness of an individual human life thus never exhausts the total set of potentialities of the human historical project. Without falling into the transhumanist trap of coveting the realization of every conceivable human potentiality, I point out that there is an element of tragedy in the gap between the possible and the imaginable. Ironically, this tragic element is our most profound motivation for living well. Death ends the possibility of doing good things, correcting mistakes, and overcoming injustices. The tragic element of life reminds us to live well not only for our own sake, but

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also to generate collective life-capital for future generations. If one has lived a life rich in meaningful projects and experiences, coming to terms with one’s own death means refusing to see it as the unjust termination of life. The good one has enjoyed is a human good, and all human goods are, for individuals, limited.

chapter 1

Do Suffering and Death Prove That Life Is Not Worth Living? If we let ordinary experience be our guide, the goodness of life in general hardly seems questionable. People in every culture choose to endure hardship in the face of adversity and deprivation rather than commit suicide. Moreover, they do not just continue to live, but to produce more life. Even in the most dire social, political, and economic circumstance people not only continue to live, but give rise to new life that might somehow enjoy the peace and beauty denied them. Happiness, good humour, delight, love, passion, and talent are not the preserve of the rich alone, but experienced and realized by the poor as well. This situation does not justify poverty; it demonstrates the strength of the belief that it is better to live than not, and explains how people find the strength to fight for more of what they need in unjust social conditions. Life-value philosophy arises from reflection upon this ordinary experience and seeks to express clearly the principle implied in it. Herbert Marcuse states its most basic formulation: “It is better to live than not to live.”1 The problem with this generic assertion is that it does not tell us clearly what the actual goodness of living is, only that it is better than being dead. The life-value philosophy of John McMurtry provides a systematic answer to the question of what the actual good of living is. He argues that what makes all human life enjoyable and good, to the extent that it is, is the realization of our capacities for experience, thought and imagination, and creative activity. “All life whatever,” McMurtry argues, “has intrinsic value insofar as it itself moves, feels, or thinks. The measure of its value is … the extent to which it expresses or enables vertical-depth and horizontal-breadth of life range on these parameters. In short, the more life fields the better, and the more range on each and all

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together, the more value is borne.”2 In this view it is not life as such that is bad, but social circumstances and value systems that deprive some groups of people of the material conditions for realizing and enjoying their capacities for experience, thought, and creative activity. Furnished with that which is necessary, people can make their own decisions about how to best express and enjoy their human capacities and in that way prove the everyday assumption that life is good, worth living, and worth improving for the future generations we continue to engender in our reproductive acts. What if the ordinary experience from which life-value philosophy builds its conclusions is radically in error? What if it is the product of self-deception, born from fear of the nothingness of death rather than clear-eyed insight into life, which might be, as Pope Innocent III insists, nothing but miserable tumult? “Nowhere is there rest and quiet, nowhere peace and security, everywhere is fear and trembling, toil and trouble. The flesh is troubled during life.”3 If Pliny the Elder is correct, the belief that it is better to live than not is perhaps unschooled naïveté. “Beginning to think,” Camus argued, “is beginning to be undermined.”4 Thinking undermines the conviction that life matters. Camus believed that life can be enjoyed even if it is absurd, but recognition of its absurdity undermines the belief that it is objectively good. As Thomas Nagel notes, “What makes doubt inescapable with regard to the limited aims of individual life also makes it inescapable with regard to any larger purpose that encourages the sense that life is meaningful. Once the fundamental doubt has begun, it cannot be laid to rest.”5 Philosophy demands reflective attention to the problems of living life, as well as acceptance of the conclusions of good-faith answers to those problems. Philosophers must thus at least approach the problem of the objective value of life with an open and undecided mind. We might find that the best answer to the question of whether life is objectively valuable is no. Camus himself chose subjective valuation of life as the solution to existential crisis. However, not everyone who has run the gauntlet of existential doubt agrees that this choice is sound. Some of the most poetically rich and philosophically deep thinkers have concluded that life is not objectively valuable, that it would have been better to never have been born.

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It takes philosophical courage to call into question as universal a belief as the belief in the goodness of life. The pessimistic tradition in poetry and philosophy that Innocent III encapsulates is rooted in the courage to oppose ordinary, everyday assumptions about the goodness of life. These pessimists do not doubt the empirical facts that people face their struggles and that they believe their lives are intrinsically valuable. They ask whether these struggles prove that life is objectively valuable or that it is better to live than not. Pessimists invoke experiences and pose arguments that contest the goodness of realizing our capacities for feeling, movement, and thought. From the pessimistic perspective, freeze-framed moments of life might be enjoyed, but they do not prove that life is good or really worth living. Lived long enough, life’s goods will become their opposites: senses will degrade, movement will become impossible, thinking will decay, loved ones will die, until there is nothing left but one’s own imminent death. These apparent disvalues are not exceptional but inescapable. This chapter will examine some paradigmatic poetic evocations and philosophical defences of pessimism. The pessimistic challenge is not for professional philosophical dispute alone. Poetry articulates the affective dimension of existential issues about the meaning, purpose, and ultimate value of life. When we deal with ultimate questions, we need both affect and argument, so that the chosen outcome is both desired and rationally defensible. Poetry here serves the role of awakening us from our dogmatic slumbers by making us feel the necessity of posing hard questions about the value of life. The philosophical arguments that follow take up the poetic building blocks of pessimism and assemble them into a critique of the conclusion that it is naive to believe that life is objectively valuable. The critique will suggest that pessimism fails to appreciate a crucial distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic limits to human enjoyment. Intrinsic limitations stem from our embodied, finite nature. They are intrinsic not only insofar as they are constitutive elements of our human organism, but also because they shape our expectations, goals, and goods. Moreover, insofar as they limit humans’ reasonable expectations, they do not advantage any other individual. They do not entail any pernicious class, or racial, or gender hierarchy, but are common structures of human life that, in principle, we all

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must face and live within as human beings. Liability to illness in general is an intrinsic limitation of embodied human being. By contrast, extrinsic limitations stem from oppressive, alienating, or exploitative societies that systematically deprive some groups of resources for full human lives. Lacking access to quality health care because it is unaffordable, and thus suffering longer bouts of illness or facing higher mortality rates, is an extrinsic limitation of the goodness of the life of the deprived. We can see the distinction in the fact that if we overcome structural inequalities in access to health care, we do not thereby overcome our general liability to disease. My main argument will be that intrinsic limitations on what it is possible for human beings to experience and become is not inimical to, but in fact shapes, the value and goodness of human life as such. Extrinsic limitations, by contrast, are the enemies of life’s value and goodness and the target of social and political struggles to ensure the comprehensive and universal satisfaction of the natural and social conditions of good lives. Pessimism challenges (unsuccessfully, I will argue) the salience of the distinction by emphasizing the badness of the experience of pain over its different sources and causes.

1.1 Life as Disvalue I: Poetic Evocations From the moment that people began to record their stories, loud lamentations about the evils of life were sung. One of the first and finest examples of poetic pessimism is the story of Job. When his life was going well, Job never imagined he would regret being born. But then, allowed by God to test Job’s love, Satan systematically strips Job of everything he holds dear. Destruction of the material conditions of the goodness of Job’s life leads to the destruction of his love of life. Having lost fields, family, and friends, Job cries out, “Why died I not when born, why perished I not at birth? … I would have been lying still, I would have slept in peace … why does God give sufferers light, and life to men in bitter despair, who long for death?”6 While Job’s deep love of the transcendent God ultimately sustains him through his existential crisis, faith in a transcendent God is not a materially rational basis for the valuation of life. Hence, the conclusion of the

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story of Job, from my standpoint, is that when the foundations of a good life on earth are destroyed, so too is the good. If there is no possibility of rebuilding those foundations, life becomes a misfortune. When his focus is the transitory nature of the goods of life, Job suffers the pain of loss, and, in the throes of this pain, he concludes that it would have been better to never have been born. This point is made with equal urgency in Oedipus at Colonus, in which Sophocles (himself close to ninety when he wrote it) has the chorus warn humanity not to wish for long life, but rather for none at all: “Show me the man who asks an overabundant share of life, in love with more, and ill content with less, and I will show you one in love with foolishness. In the accumulation of many years, pain is in plenty, and joy not anywhere when life is overspent. At last there is some release, when death appears … say what you will, the greatest boon is not to be; But, life begun, soonest to end is best.”7 The chorus invokes feeling against abstract inference. While one might think, as a matter of logic, if something is good more of it is better, our bodies prove that the matter is otherwise in the case of life. The aging body is a body in pain. Anyone who has attained extreme old age (as Sophocles had) understands that we feel the truths of life in our aching bones and failing senses. If we value life for the goods of youthful vigour, beauty, acuity, and courage, old age will negate those goods. If the universal affirmation of the goodness of life is rooted only in the experience of youth, old age will prove the one-sidedness and thus falsity of the early universal affirmation. Life might start out good, but it becomes bad, and since its becoming bad is ultimately necessary, it is best to never exist (or, if one is unlucky enough to be born, then to die as soon as possible). Both Job and Oedipus are pained at this realization. The poetic power of the stories lies in the vivacity by which they communicate to readers how quickly “things can fall apart.”8 In these fragments, we can see the outlines of the pessimistic position, but also the tension that might prove its undoing. On the one hand, Job laments his losses, which implies that he did not regard life as disvaluable until its material foundations collapsed. What he laments is not life as such, but the loss of the means of living well. The Sophoclean chorus likewise does not prove that life as such is

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disvaluable, but only a life that lasts past the point where more lifevaluable activity and experience are possible. We should not regard these fragments as proofs, but provocations to think about the crucial question posed by pessimism: must goods be metaphysically permanent or eternal in order to be good? It is clear that earthly goods are not permanent. Does it follow, as Job and the chorus maintain, that life is essentially bad? They seem to answer yes, and the other pessimistic positions we will now examine seem to support the position that, unless life is unendingly good, it is bad. However, I will argue that there is a subtle non sequitur at work here. The answer more consistent with even the most uncompromising pessimistic position is that the real bads that life contains do not necessarily mean that life as such and as a whole is bad. In the stories of Job and Oedipus, the reader is forced to confront the transitoriness of the particular goods that a good life must contain. However, one could imagine an anti-Job who gets through a long life without ever losing anything of value and dies peacefully. Hence, the stories of Job and Oedipus demonstrate only that it is possible to experience the transitoriness of the things and people we value, but not necessary. There is no reason why such an alternative cannot be imagined. Still, the pessimists might respond that no matter how fortunate one is in love and money, no one will be able to escape death. Thus, no one will be able to live in such a way that they will not have to confront the transitoriness of the most important thing involved in the goodness of their life: their own socially selfconscious existence. The cogency of the pessimistic position cannot be assessed until the implications of death for the determination of life’s goodness and badness have been felt and rationally examined. Book XI of Milton’s Paradise Lost, in which Adam is informed that the punishment for Eve’s transgression is death, will explore the role that the felt terror that death evokes in us plays in establishing the belief that death ruins even the best life and, therefore, the goodness of life as such. Milton’s genius is to see the story of the Fall as the story of the birth of embodied, mortal humanity. The radically transformed understanding of human beings, created immortal and then sentenced to mortality, is the perfect poetic laboratory to test the pessimistic

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hypothesis. The truth of the claim that life’s goods must be eternal if they are to be good could only be confirmed by a being who has known both. No one can actually experience an eternal good, but all of us can imagine a good that does not end. Adam, Eve, and the Garden are thus metaphors for the two sides of life that clash so powerfully in pessimism: the power to imaginatively project present goods as unending, and the knowledge that every good, and life itself, must end. Their reaction will enable us to feel the terror of the death sentence that hangs over all of us; their recovery provides a clue as to how the challenge of pessimism might best be met. Initially, Adam and Eve live a life of unchanging, easily won pleasures and treat the world and each other as mirrors of their own beauty and goodness. Through their transgression – and this is the brilliance of Milton’s treatment of the problem of death – Adam and Eve introduce consciousness of finitude into human life, not simply as a physical fact about our material nature, but as the primary source of suffering, and thus also the primary cause of existential regret about being alive. Of course, prior to Eve’s eating from the Tree of Life, both had limited human capacities for activity and experience, but there was no defined temporal limit on how long they would be alive to feel, think, act, and love each other. Their bodies were sources of mutual pleasure, not shame, they ate because food was delicious, not because hunger was painful, and they lived, ex hypothesi, in the expectation that life would go on forever. Everything changes when they are condemned to death. For Milton, this death sentence marks the separation of humanity from the ready-made satisfactions of an unreflective natural life. Prior to eating of the Tree of Life, the idea that time passed (i.e., each moment of life lived was irrevocably lost) could not occur to Adam and Eve, because they had no set end point to their existence. They were of course aware of the natural cycles of night and day, but that a particular day could be the last day, that time was a matrix for a life that could end, was foreign to their self-understanding. As soon as one becomes aware that life will end, one becomes aware of the passage of time as the irrevocable loss of past states of being. At the same time, consciousness of the irrevocable loss of life time to the irretrievable past is consciousness of the material possibility that any

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future moment can be one’s last, and – worse – that one future moment will be one’s last. Terror at the contemplation of this inevitability is the primary threat that mortals face to their ability to value the limited lives they do enjoy. While animals fear concrete threats, Adam and Eve discover an entirely different order of fear after the Archangel Michael informs them of God’s sentence. Fear of death is not simply fear of non-existence. It is fear of the process of decay that leads to death, and, as importantly, fear of being trapped within that inexorable process. In their paradisiac state, Adam and Eve never experience a conflict between their desires and the environment’s capacity to satisfy them. After they become mortal, they experience a desire for life unending that the environment cannot satisfy. They realize that they will die and so be cut off forever from their own and earthly beauty and goodness, and that there is nothing either one can do to stop the process. Once this recognition has dawned, their subjective valuation of life collapses into terror. Terror first forms in response to visions of the egregiously painful ways human beings can die. “Death thou has seen / In his first shape on man; but many shapes / Of Death and many are the ways that lead / To his grim cave, all dismal; yet to sense / More terrible at the entrance than within.”9 Death as a state of permanent non-existence itself is not the first object of fear, but rather the extreme physical suffering that sickness will cause the living body to undergo before it finally dies. “Immediately a place / Before his eyes appeared, sad, noisome, dark / a lazar house it seemed, wherein were laid / Numbers of all diseased, all maladies of ghastly spasm, or racking torture, qualms / of heartsick agony … Dire was the tossing, deep the groans; Despair / Tended the sick … And over them triumphant Death his dart shook, but delayed to strike.”10 By explicitly noting that Death delays the mortal blow, Milton emphasizes the true horror of mortal life: it can be so bad that the sufferer wishes for death, even though death is annihilation. A crueller existential paradox could not be imagined. Adam is quick to understand the point of Michael’s demonstration. The expression of life-capacities is enjoyable, but this enjoyment is always threatened by disease and death. Yet disease and death are not the only threats to the experience of life as valuable. Prior to the final

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agonies of our lives, we will grow old and, in growing old, witness the loss of the vigour and beauty that constitute so much of what we love about our lives in youth. The entry of their lives into time also means their entry into a life of stages: of growth, maturation, loss of capacity, and death. Then thou must outlive Thy youth, thy strength; thy beauty, which will change To withered weak, and grey; thy senses then Obtuse, all taste of pleasure must forgo To what thou hast, and for the air of youth Hopeful and cheerful, in thy blood will reign A melancholy damp of cold and dry To weigh thy spirits down, and last consume The balm of life.11 As with suffering, loss of strength and capacity for enjoyment destroys happiness directly, by undermining our physical and mental ability to experience it, and indirectly, by setting up anticipatory fears that ruin our experience of the good moments. Living loses its allure and is endured only as “a slow evil / A long day’s dying to augment our pain.”12 Thus, like Job and the chorus in Oedipus at Colonus, Adam concludes that it would have been better to have never been born. An unending, pleasurable, and active life would be best, but the life of the flesh, marred by sickness, accident, failure, and death, is the greatest disvalue. O miserable mankind, to what fall Degraded, to what wretched state reserved! Better end here unborn. Why is life given, To be wrested from us? rather why Obtruded on us thus? who if we knew What we receive Would rather not accept Life offered or soon to lay it down Glad to be dismissed in peace.13

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Having known the bliss of unending pleasure, Adam temporarily concludes that mortal embodied life is unbearable. He does not reject the goodness of those aspects of life prior to the Fall that he enjoyed: his senses, his tastes, his relationship with Eve, the work they freely performed. Recognition that one day he will not be alive and conscious to enjoy his life ultimately ruins its value. This recognition implies yet another reason why mortal life is bad: envy at the likelihood that the goods of life will continue for others. To live within the beauty and life-sustaining fullness of nature, to love and be loved by a caring and beautiful partner, to have important work to do but to not be exhausted or destroyed by it, these are elements of the highest good for human beings. Death ensures that we can enjoy them only for a finite time. Consciousness of finitude is thus consciousness of the fact that the objective goods of life continue on without us, and this fact, regarded exclusively from the subjective perspective, adds to the feeling that mortal life is disvaluable. Job, the chorus, and Adam in his initial reaction to death all speak from an abstract egocentric perspective that reduces life’s goodness to private experience of particular goods. Others too might find life good (or bad), but all that matters from the egocentric perspective is one’s own private experience, which, because it ends in death, ends the only good of life it is meaningful to talk about: one’s own. If all that counts is the individual’s own experiences and valuations, then the fact that both the material conditions of good lives and good lives for other people might exist after one is gone appears to be of no consequence to one’s private good. Since the value of human experience and activity depends, for the agent, on their consciousness of it, then, after the destruction of that consciousness, it is no longer possible for the person to enjoy anything at all. If one desires a good life unending, once one recognizes that the goal is impossible, it is easy to conclude, as all three characters here do, that it would have been better never to have been born. The great pessimistic Italian poet Leopardi sums the matter up: “True happiness, for which alone / Our mortal nature longs or strives / no man, or for himself, or others, e’er acquires.”14

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1.2 Life as Disvalue II: Philosophical Arguments The fears and frustrations caused by mortality are the unproblematic substance of the poet’s work. These same fears and frustrations are the starting point for the philosopher’s analysis and argument. Schopenhauer is a philosophical pessimist because he contends that most people live their lives according to metaphysical illusions and not a true picture of life’s real nature. Once these illusions have been exposed, people can no longer value life the way they did before philosophical understanding broke the spell. Whereas the dominant traditions of Western philosophy maintain that a life well lived satisfies the desires that motivate our activity and leads to happiness, Schopenhauer argues that life itself proves the opposite conclusion. For Schopenhauer, “the highest, the most real, the metaphysical being to which philosophers had directed their view … is not at the same time the good.”15 Life is striving, but the lasting satisfaction that happiness requires is never achieved. Life, well lived or not, is suffering, not happiness. For Schopenhauer, the priority of the good (fulfillment) over evil (lack, absence, desire) in the history of philosophy is a necessary illusion because people would not persist in being if they realized that lasting individual happiness is impossible to achieve. Rather than satisfaction and happiness, privation is the normal state of living things. If the philosophical tradition has defined privation as evil, and if privation predominates, it follows that life is (primarily) evil. If evil is the normal and natural state of life, then it follows that life is not good but evil, at least insofar as it consists in constant striving to satisfy desires that can never be finally satisfied. The argument may be pessimistic, but experience testifies to its truth: all life, plant, animal, and human, acts only in response to unmet needs and desires. If desire (lack, evil) ceases, so too would life-activity. No individual desires to die, but, in order to live, each must suffer the continual spurs of unmet desires. “I know of no greater absurdity,” he argues, “than that propounded by most systems of philosophy in declaring evil to be negative in character. Evil is just what is positive: it makes its own existence felt. It is good that is negative; in other words, happiness and satisfaction always imply some desire fulfilled, some state of pain

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brought to an end.”16 There is thus no positive feeling of the good; what one feels in the moment of satisfaction is mere absence of wanting. Schopenhauer does not deny the instrumental life-value of desire satisfaction, only that such desire satisfaction is sufficient justification for the conclusion that individual life is good. Rather, he concludes that individual, embodied life as such is a disvalue because its normal and natural state is suffering. Although Schopenhauer was writing prior to the theory of evolution, he anticipates certain of its psychological implications. The illusion that life is meaningful and good is, in a sense, an evolutionary defence mechanism that ensures that people will live long enough to reproduce, which they might not if they faced the truth of life’s evil squarely. Schopenhauer accepts the traditional function of philosophy to expose the truth to consciousness, but does not believe that the enlightenment he offers will be accepted. At least for most people, life and a rational life are in conflict. Unthinking will maintains life; individual reason would decide that it is not worth the struggle simply to be a moment in the unfolding of the universal will, and so it refuses to acknowledge this truth. “Life so clearly bears the stamp of something that ought to disgust us,” he argues, “that it is difficult to conceive how anyone could fail to recognise this and be persuaded that life is to be thankfully enjoyed … On the contrary, that continual deception and disillusionment, as well as the general nature of life, present themselves as intended and calculated to awaken the conviction that nothing whatever is worth our exertions … that all good things are fleeting, that the world on all sides is bankrupt, and that life is a business that does not cover the costs; so that our will may turn away from it.”17 Rational enquiry into the nature of mortal existence encounters only ephemeral enjoyments but nothing that would support the conclusion that life is, as such, objectively valuable. Even if, per impossibile, people found some means to overcome all the extrinsic impediments to their happiness, they would still find ways to undermine this achievement. In a brilliant thought experiment, Schopenhauer imagines away all such impediments to a life of uninterrupted satisfaction. What we would discover, he contends, is that goodness cannot be a state of permanent satisfaction because

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even those goods that life does contain depend upon contrast with the evil of privation. If we removed the negative state, we would negate its contrasting positive good. Fulfillment is good because it fills a real lack without which there would be no pleasure. Without external impediments to our happiness, we would cease to be happy, and would either commit suicide out of boredom, or cause trouble for ourselves in an effort to restart the dialectic from which we had just escaped. Milton’s reading of the expulsion from the Garden bears out Schopenhauer’s point: “Certain it is that work, worry, labour, and trouble, form the lot of almost all men their whole life long. But if all wishes were granted as soon as they arose, how would men occupy their lives? If the world were a paradise of luxury and ease … men would either die of boredom, or hang themselves; or else there would be massacres, and murders; so that in the end mankind would inflict more suffering on itself than it has now to accept at the hands of Nature.”18 Though furnished with everything they needed for a good life, Eve and Adam could not resist the one thing forbidden them, even at the cost of losing access to the easy abundance of Eden. Can rational acceptance of the necessity of work and struggle solve this problem, as one might read Schopenhauer to suggest? If we accept that we must work to achieve even the temporary pleasures we are capable of experiencing, and we understand that there is nothing higher possible in life, then we should be able to at least reconcile ourselves to our embodied finitude. Schopenhauer does not rule out this possibility but notes that death, and not the ephemerality of pleasure, is for most people the primary evil of life. People strive for respite from the evil of privation, succeed occasionally, but cannot enjoy the moments of pleasure they earn because they know that their life as a whole is finite. Trapped between a life filled with mostly suffering and the annihilation they fear, people choose life, but in vain. “The greatest of evils,” Schopenhauer argues, “the worst thing that can threaten anywhere, is death; the greatest anxiety is the anxiety of death.”19 Death is the worst of all of life’s miseries because it annihilates the self-conscious ego. Schopenhauer himself does not regard death as the greatest of evils. Influenced by Buddhism, he interprets death as liberation from the suffering that desire causes. He supports his position with two reasons.

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First, if one understands death as the negation of self-consciousness, and self-consciousness as the seat of the desires that cause suffering, death ends suffering. Second, Schopenhauer’s metaphysics carry him beyond this negative conclusion to the positive claim that death is a nirvana-like return to a state of positive value – peaceful, deindividuated existence at one with the universal will to life from which all individuals derive their being. “Dying is the moment of that liberation from the one-sidedness of an individuality which does not constitute the innermost kernel of our real being, but is rather to be thought of as a kind of aberration thereof … [the good person] wishes to die actually and not merely apparently, and consequently needs no continuance of his person. He willingly gives up the existence we know [in exchange for] … what the Buddhist faith calls Nirvana, that is, extinction.”20 My concern is not with the cogency of Schopenhauer’s understanding of the relationship between individual lifebearers and the universal will to live or with the interpretive adequacy of his reading of nirvana, but only with the reasons that he gives to support his conclusion that the prospect of nirvana is no comfort to most people. For Schopenhauer, death is the dissolution of the ego into universal being. However, he notes that most people do not desire integration with some universal force, but personal immortality. Whether one calls the state after life death or nirvana, the fact of the matter, from the individual perspective, is that one will no longer exist as a self-conscious individual. Fear of death cannot be overcome by the promise of peaceful de-individuation and re-integration with the universal will, for the same reason that such fear is not overcome by the more scientifically credible claim that the physical elements that compose one’s body return to nature and become parts of new entities. As true as either claim might be, both remain an object of fear because the desire to live forever is the desire for the persistence of one’s own self-consciousness. “So you think,” Schopenhauer has an imaginary interlocutor argue, “you’re going to do me out of my individuality with all this fine talk. But I’m up to your tricks. I tell you I won’t exist unless I can have my individuality. I’m not going to be put off with ‘mysterious powers’ and what you call ‘phenomena.’ I can’t do without my individuality, and I won’t give it up.”21 The only immortality people

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desire is the immortality they cannot possibly have – unending persistence of their self-identity. The unsatisfiable desire for immortality thus becomes a final source of disvalue in life. A very few philosophically minded people, Schopenhauer maintains, will welcome the extinction of their individuality.22 Yet he also knows that this conclusion will be of no comfort to most people, who, like his imaginary interlocutor, will not be cheated out of their individuality. While Schopenhauer provides reasons to be pessimistic about the goodness of life, he does not argue that it is better to not be born. Instead, he sees birth as essential to the perpetuation of the universal will, which he regards as the immortal element of individual human beings and good, in contrast to the narrow egocentrism that drives most people.23 If people would only understand that they are a finite moment of a universal, immortal will, they would be cured of their fear of death and the suffering it causes. That we do not draw this conclusion shows just how powerful egocentrism is. However, it also suggests that we can overcome the evil of individual life by expanding our identity beyond self-enclosed consciousness towards the universal substance of our individual being. Schopenhauer does not preach indifference to the conduct of life but rather care and concern for one another so that we might alleviate as best we can the suffering we encounter. As Baruchello notes, Schopenhauer argued that the best way to live is to devote oneself to alleviating the suffering of others: “Humanity too is an enhancement of wider ranges of thought, felt being, and action. Schopenhauer depicted this form of negation of the Will to Live as human agency aimed at relieving other people and/or living creatures from their suffering, rather than fighting against them in view of ultimately unattainable pleasures. Whether the agent’s life-range benefits directly from it or not, i.e. whether he/she feels morally good in being humane or not, the recipient of humanity is necessarily going to experience an increase of his/her own life-range.”24 Schopenhauer is pessimistic, but he implies a way to at least endure embodied mortal life, and thus a more robust way out of pessimism. His pessimistic conclusions can be avoided if there is a way to expand our understanding of our own private good by identifying it with the good of others that our activity helps to promote.

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However, there is a stronger case for pessimism by David Benatar. He shares Schopenhauer’s keen eye for the self-deceptive stories people tell themselves to help them bear the travails of life. Instead of arguing, as Schopenhauer does, in favour of the dissolution of the ego into an abstractly universal will, Benatar argues against the value of coming into existence in the first place. His central argument is that a rational evaluation of the consequences of human finitude leads to the conclusion that its goods cannot compensate for the harms that life inevitably involves. It would be better, therefore, not to have come into existence. Not existing, he claims, is not a harm to the possible person who never in fact exists. Possible people who never come into existence can neither suffer harm, nor regret missing the mostly meagre pleasures that existence sometimes involves. Like Schopenhauer, Benatar is aware that his argument is contrary to the conclusions of unphilosophical self-evaluation. Almost everyone agrees that while life may be difficult, its pleasures make it worthwhile, and they prove this conclusion by continuing to live and by bringing new generations into existence. However, when they draw this conclusion Benatar contends that people are ignoring abundant evidence that, if dispassionately considered, proves that it would be better to never be born: “That existence is always a harm may be a hard conclusion to swallow. Most people do not regret their very existence. Many are happy to have come into being because they enjoy their lives. But these arguments are mistaken … The fact that one enjoys one’s life does not make one’s existence better than non-existence, because if one had not come into existence, there would have been nobody to have missed the joy of leading that life and so the absence of joy would not be bad.”25 If the good of life is pleasure and the bad is pain, and there are more pains than pleasures, life, objectively considered, is bad. If philosophy has a duty to prevent harm, then it has a duty to argue against bringing new life into the world, because doing so will harm the new person. Not bringing them into the world means there is no person to miss out on pleasure. Benatar’s argument is paradigmatic of philosophical reasoning abstracting itself from entanglement with the ordinary, positive psychological dispositions people form towards their lives. Philosophy does not grow out of our ordinary life-activity, for Benatar, but in

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opposition to it, as a judge above the fray, seated on a rationalist throne. Benatar believes that he discovers from his abstractly rationalist standpoint the truth that people enjoy their lives only on condition that they systematically ignore what those lives really involve. “No life is without hardship,” he maintains, “millions live a life of poverty … most of us suffer ill health at some stage in our lives … we all face death. We infrequently contemplate the harms that await any newborn. Only existers suffer harm.”26 There is no doubt that the experiences and states of being that he lists are harms, and there is no doubt that almost no one who exists for even a few years can escape suffering at least one of them. Like Schopenhauer, Benatar argues that even though life necessarily involves repeated harms, people fear death even more than harm. Hence, they invent various strategies of self-deception to convince themselves that life is better than it actually is. He suggests that our capacity for self-deception is a product of natural selection: the capacity to ignore harm is an evolutionary advantage insofar as it encourages people to produce new life. If people considered the costs and benefits of existence, they might decide not to reproduce.27 Benatar does not deny that if one exists, it is possible to enjoy certain moments, but only that the momentary pleasures of life are sufficient to compensate for its many and varied harms: “It is good that existers enjoy their pleasures. It is also good that pains are avoided through non-existence … Because there is nothing bad about never coming into existence, but there is something bad about coming into existence, it seems that all things considered non-existence is preferable.”28 Hence, the rational conclusion of dispassionate reflection on life is that it is bad and non-existence is preferable. Let me be clear that Benatar is not arguing that it is better to die than to live. He distinguishes carefully between the cases of not being born and committing suicide. If people enjoy their lives, they should continue them: having already been born, they may desire to continue to live, and this desire counts in favour of life. Thus, if a critic were to object that Benatar’s position means that everyone alive should immediately kill themselves, but they do not, thus proving that life is worth living, Benatar has a cogent response to this attempted reductio ad absurdum: “Nevertheless, the view that coming

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into existence is always a harm does not imply that death is better than continuing to exist, a fortiori that suicide is (always) desirable. Life may be sufficiently bad that it is better not to come into existence, but not so bad that it is better to cease existing … This is because the existent can have interests in continuing to exist.”29 Thus, Benatar does not argue that life is not worth living, but that it is not worth beginning. Even if we grant Benatar this distinction between suicide and never being born (as we should), there remain formal and existential problems with his argument. Formally, Benatar’s argument depends upon what he calls the “asymmetry” between the forgone pleasures and the avoided harms of non-existence. The former are “not bad” according to Benatar, while the latter are positive goods. “The important question, when the absence of pleasure involves no deprivation for anybody, is whether it is also ‘not bad’ or whether it is ‘bad.’ The answer, I suggest, is that it is ‘not good, but not bad either,’ rather than ‘not good, but bad.”’30 Pain, Benatar believes, is always bad, and its absence or avoidance always a positive good. Conversely, the presence of pleasure is good, but its absence, he contends, is only “not bad.” Consequently, there not being anyone to suffer pain is a positive good, while there not being anyone to miss experiencing pleasure is not bad. The positively good is better than the merely not bad and so non-existence is better than existence. The asymmetry argument is central to Benatar’s conclusion, but it is also a weak link in his chain of reasoning. Ben Bradley has advanced two decisive criticisms. The first is that Benatar provides no reason (beyond the fact that his conclusion requires it) to accept the principle that absent states can be meaningfully compared. Strictly speaking, there are no such things as non-existent people or the potential harms and pains their non-existence “allows” them to avoid. These absent states of absent people cannot be compared, because comparison presupposes the existence of that which is compared. Relations of symmetry or asymmetry cannot be established, and thus Benatar’s argument fails. Suppose, nevertheless, that, in an excess of charity, one grants Benatar his comparison between non-existent states. Bradley has a second and even more damaging criticism: “Suppose absences are

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comparable with each other, so that the absence of pleasure in the non-existent is comparable in value with the absence of pain in the non-existent. Then, assuming … that existing pleasures and pains are comparable in value, transitivity yields comparability [and not asymmetry] between pleasure and absence of pleasure.”31 If pain is bad and the absence of pain is good, transitivity yields that if pleasure is good its absence is bad. Hence, if non-existence is good to the extent that it avoids harms, it is also bad (rather than, as Benatar argued, “not bad”) to the extent that it involves forgone pleasures. Hence, Benatar’s conclusion that it is always better not to exist does not follow. While Bradley’s formal critique is sound, it leaves the deeper existential-ethical problem of the value of life as such unaddressed. It may be that Benatar’s asymmetry argument fails, but he may still be correct that life is not worth beginning, and thus that it is better to never come into being, on the substantive grounds that it is overall a disvalue and that anything of value in it will be destroyed by death. If one wants to object convincingly to that conclusion, it is necessary to find within life itself grounds to support the judgment that it is of ultimate and intrinsic value, despite the suffering it involves. Other critics have articulated substantive objections to Benatar’s conclusions that are of greater significance to the more fundamental level of analysis of life’s value that concerns me. Those objections focus on the paternalistic and abstract nature of Benatar’s arguments. Benatar argues that it is better never to exist because life involves suffering, loss, disappointment, and death. He imagines a possible life in which none of these intrinsic limitations exist, sees that such a life is materially impossible, and concludes that real human lives are not worth beginning. In making this argument, Benatar compares real life with an imagined perfect life and concludes that real life is a disvalue in comparison with the ideal. He does not compare actual life with life as it could plausibly be improved through struggle against the extrinsic causes of harm, even though he does accept in principle that life, once begun, is enjoyable and worth continuing. Rather than isolate the things and experiences that make real life enjoyable and worth continuing, suggest political strategies for ensuring that as many people as possible enjoy such conditions of life for as much of their lives as possible, and counsel acceptance of the

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unchangeable intrinsic frames of finitude within which embodied material life must be led, Benatar considers life “sub specie aeternitatis,” purified of all material harms and existential angst. He then compares this abstract ideal to life’s terrestrial reality, finding “the quality of human life … wanting” in comparison.32 The problem with the argument is that the comparison itself is unsound. If one wants to argue that life is essentially disvaluable, then the object of comparison must be a life that it is possible for a human being to live, and not life as it can be imagined to be, free of all infirmity and disappointment. The question should be whether the lives of mortal finite beings can be made worth living. The travails of mortal life, in Benatar’s view, are not boundaries or frames within which worthwhile experiences, relationships, and projects can be developed. These frames of finitude are presented as absolute negations of the value of real experiences, relationships, and projects. In an imaginary world the harms do not exist, and that life would be worth beginning, but not a real, material, embodied life. However, if one drops the impossible demand for a life lived outside the frames of human finitude, if one considers the goodness of life as the goodness of a materially possible human life, distinguishing always between limits of human embodiment that cannot be changed and suffering that can be overcome by collective and individual action, it is possible to conclude that human life is valuable, because it is open and improvable within the fixed frames of finitude. In fact, people’s own reflective behaviour supports this conclusion. Not only do people struggle to keep themselves alive and bring new life into the world, they also struggle to ensure that life is protected and enhanced as far as possible. These struggles are not automatic, genetically programmed behaviours, nor naive wishful thinking, but consciously developed projects that bear real fruit in the form of demonstrably improved lives. Benatar may see that people’s own life-activity makes life worth continuing, but he misses the more important point: it also makes it worth beginning. While there is a distinction between suicide and never being born, the reasons that make life worth continuing also make it worth beginning. If there are pleasures enough to make life for the living worth continuing, and if, through present activity, we can reduce the harms that we are able to reduce, the reasons that

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count in favour of continuing life should also count, if we are being consistent, in favour of being born. If life is not so bad that the living should commit suicide, it is also not so bad that new life will regret being born if they are so. If we attribute any value at all to people’s subjective interpretations of their lives, and most living people do not regret being born or kill themselves, it follows that the newborn will not regret their lives either. Rather, once alive, a newborn will form the same sort of interests in living, become an active agent in the order of things, and contribute (in the ways I will explain in chapter 4) to life’s further improvement. As Len Doyal points out, Benatar fails to properly value people’s own subjective evaluations of life. “There is something extraordinarily paternalistic,” Doyal contends, about suggesting that people’s self-evaluations are always self-deceptions. “Yet,” he continues, “Benatar has no option but to be dismissive of all of us who believe that the experience of being alive and of striving for our individual stamp of meaning within it makes the perceived or non-perceived harms of human existence worth the potential benefits.”33 Life’s value or disvalue is not an abstraction that can be determined independently of people’s concrete lived experiences, because life’s value has an irreducibly subjective dimension. There is something almost Manichean about Benatar’s understanding of good and bad. If something is bad it is bad simpliciter, the opposite of the good. The good is conceived in like fashion, leading to an undialectical opposition between good and bad. His stark way of defining these terms permits Benatar to construct balance sheets of harm and benefit, but at the cost of missing the real complexity of the relationships between good and bad in real lives. David DeGrazia rightly argues that any convincing and satisfactory evaluation of life must “take into account what sort of creatures human beings are, [because] our good bears a significant relationship to [essential] aspects of our human nature.”34 Much of our human good, as Schopenhauer understood, involves releasing tension by satisfying desires. The latter are pains, but if the good involves overcoming those pains, the good and the bad cannot be separated in life. It does not follow in consequence that life is not good because it involves bads, but rather, as Saul Smilansky urges, “the ‘bad’ aspects of life sometimes

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enhance the enjoyment of the good.”35 If bad and good are inextricably intertwined, the nature of good and bad is more complex than Benatar’s abstract opposition allows. His understanding of good and bad abstracts from their real entanglement in human life and thus distorts the way in which both are actually experienced in human life. My response to Benatar agrees with Smilansky that the bads of life sometimes just enhance its goods, but goes further. The main argument I will make, beginning in the next section and evolving through the rest of the book, is that although they might be experienced as painful, the intrinsic frames of finitude within which life must be led – dependence on nature and interdependence with other people in society, liability to disease and organic decline, susceptibility to failure and loss, and the inevitability of death – are not thereby bad. Human beings are vulnerable, finite, and mortal. Therefore, as DeGrazia anticipates, the goods of human life are the goods of a vulnerable, finite, and mortal being. Even if we could abolish vulnerability, finitude, and mortality, we ought not to do so, because to abolish those constitutive elements of the good would be to abolish the good of human life itself, which is the product of various forms of non-alienated labour on the self, others, and the world which these intrinsic frames of finitude motivate and shape.

1.3 Extrinsic Causes of Harm and Intrinsic Limits to the Value of Human Life “All things come to be in accordance with strife,” Heraclitus remarked, and whether his claim is universally true, it characterizes the coming to be of human beings and their creations.36 Nevertheless, the physical pain of birth and the psychic pain of struggles to realize our life-capacities are not generally regarded as disvalues that render life not worth beginning or projects not worth undertaking. These two examples imply a general ethical conclusion that I will defend in this section: there are forms of pain intrinsic to human life that are not disvalues insofar as they are caused by the effort that the realization of our life-capacities necessarily requires. Not all pain is “evil,” and pains produced by non-alienated work and striving are in

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fact good. The pessimistic classification of pain as evil misunderstands both the nature of and the relationship between pain and pleasure, evil and good, in human life. Consider a forest fire. From the perspective of an urban tourist unfamiliar with the ecology of the boreal forest, a forest fire appears to be a catastrophic loss of tree life, a negation of the pleasure one might experience from hiking in an old growth forest. However, the forest itself requires periodic fires to clear out deadwood and open up the forest floor, to enable the seeds of some species of tree to germinate, and thus to create the general conditions that allow the emergence of the new tree life a healthy forest requires. Although the fire may prove upsetting to the tourist’s uninformed gaze, it is a constitutive condition of the ongoing life of the forest. Looking at rampikes will prove disappointing to the tourist who has only a week to spend on their vacation. But understanding the role of fire in the long-term life history of the forest will lead them to appreciate that they are witnessing one moment in an ancient cycle that must continue if there is to be a forest here for new generations of tourists. With this new insight, they can re-value their current experience and overcome their initial disappointment. An analogous conclusion holds in the case of human life. Although the pains intrinsic to the finitude of human life seem to undermine its value, the truth is that they are not essentially bad. Like the tourist confronted with the burned forest, we might immediately experience failure as painful, even as life-destroying failure. However, as the initial shock yields to reflective understanding, we realize that the goodness or badness of an experience or event is not reducible to the immediate feelings of pleasure or pain it causes. Its goodness or badness must be determined in relation to the contribution it makes to one’s achievements and experiences over the entire continuum of one’s life. What appears bad in the moment of initial experience may turn out to be good, once the time frame of evaluation is extended. The philosophically important point is that experiences cannot be immediately and permanently sorted into opposite sets, good and bad, because what is good or bad to a human life depends on contribution to present and future life, not just for the self, but for others. Experiences that appear to be disvalues – failure to

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realize a project, the collapse of a relationship, a difficult illness – thus act as challenges that turn the self against its initial self-understanding in a critical, reflective manner. They enable self-development: wider forms of self-expression, deeper forms of self and world understanding, and more varied forms of contribution to the good of others’ lives. Initial failures challenge us to understand who we really are and what we are really capable of doing by providing opportunities for work on ourselves, others, and the world through which the problem that confronts us is solved (or not). Lives lived well are not staccato moments of pain and pleasure, but continuums of effort directed towards our goals. Some pains are signs of growth of life-valuable capacities. The important point here is not only, as Smilansky argued, that some pains are necessary to some pleasures, but also that some pains are the subjective experience of overcoming immaturity. Growing pain is the good of development of sensibility, intellect, and talent outward and upward to new levels of physical capacity, insight, and emotional responsiveness and commitment to others. As McMurtry argues, “Pain is good which is intrinsic to the passing of prior limits of life-capacity. The pain is the felt side of going through them.”37 We are able to bear these pains because we know that higher-level achievements cannot be won without effort, and all effort involves pain. A pleasure acquiesced to for too long becomes a detriment to development, and thus a disvalue, even if, like some addictions, it continues to feel good. Likewise, a pain endured as a necessary mediation between an undeveloped and a realized life-capacity is an irreducible element of the achieved good. A materially rational understanding of possible human goods thus counsels learning to bear these pains. Without them, no human good that requires struggle and growth is conceivable. Continual growth through new projects requires pain. The more comfortable one’s life, the more content one is apt to be with the reward system of one’s birth, which can lead to intellectual and practical inertia that impedes development. Often, people only overcome such inertia through a traumatic and unexpected experience that they initially would have chosen not to undergo, but which, after a period of reflection, they realize spurred them to valuable new forms of engagement and activity. An unexpected trauma can refocus attention

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on the value of the relationships one tended to take for granted in the scramble up the ladder of monetary success. Sparing people these traumas would not necessarily make their lives better. Growth of understanding, an expanded circle of care and concern, and intensification of the desire to act for individual and social health are amongst the essential goods of life. Traumatic experiences are both painful and productive, and the pain is not a disvalue, but a necessary presence in life. The disruption of the pleasure of comatose consumerism or self-satisfied careerism by an unexpected trauma might seem bad initially, but such trauma can re-energize a person and re-engage them with their community. The fuller and freer kind of life that contributes more to others’ present or future well-being is more valuable than one that neglects or even destroys others’ conditions of life. Imagine a young student whose primary goal in life is to become a philosopher. They enrol in an Introduction to Western Philosophy class but are bored, more interested in imagining how it will feel to be the professor someday than in developing the intellectual discipline necessary to understand the subject. They indulge in imagination rather than work on their studies and, as a result, do poorly on the first assignment. The result is ego crushing. The student spends many nights angry with the professor, convinced that the marking and not the quality of the paper was the problem. One day, with their future on the line, they stop and reflect, reread the paper, and begin to see its many failings. The realization that they have not demanded enough of themselves checks their anger and refocuses attention on the work. They begin to excel, and one day they realize their dream. They bore the pain of failure and undertook the pain of intellectual development. Without the painful confrontation with their starting limitations, the strength of character required by the need for honest self-appraisal would not have developed, and their dream would have remained unrealized. Without pain, the student would not move beyond their self-absorbed, adolescent worldview and abilities. Those who succeed in any human endeavour are those who are able to accept their own initial incapacity – always a painful experience because it teaches us that we are not yet that which we most desire to be. The Palestinian journalist Ramzy Baroud puts the point beautifully in an open letter to young Muslims: “Sometimes I pity those who are born

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into privilege: although they have access to money and material opportunities, they can rarely appreciate the kind of experiences that only want and suffering can offer. Nothing even comes close to wisdom born out of pain.”38 When people bear painful experiences and learn from them, or seek out and willingly take on the growth pains necessary to achieve higher-level expressions of their capacities, they are demonstrating that some pains are good. Growth pains are constitutive elements of good human lives. The good of the outcome cannot be separated from effort. Once experience has taught this truth, no abstract philosophical argument like Benatar’s can undo its effects. The great value of “learning from experience” is precisely that it anchors knowledge in the body. Abstract argument might convince a person that it is safe to eat clams after a red tide, but serious food poisoning will serve as a permanent corrective to future behaviour. Analogously, once people have felt the joy of successfully realizing an important but difficult life-project, no argument sub specie aeternitatis will prove that the pains were not ultimately good. The pessimistic devaluation of life rejects the subjective dimension of the objective value of human life. That people are willing to bear the pain of struggles for self-development, illness, loss of loved ones, and anxiety about death offers strong evidence of the objective goodness of life. The good in life is not some imaginary perfection outside space and time, but the temporally limited but attainable goals and experiences that materially rational people pursue. A sound evaluation of the goodness or badness of life as such cannot do away with the subjective moment. Before life is object for observation, it must be subjective activity, valued enough that some person continued to live. The pessimists both presuppose and deny the reality of the subjective pole of valuation. Before life can be judged a disvalue, lamented, or wished away, there must be life forms that reject, lament, or wish it away. This fact demonstrates first that biological life is a material condition of the life of the philosopher whose work is devoted to proving that life as such is a disvalue. Second, and more importantly, it proves that the individual life of the pessimistic philosopher is not regarded as a dis-

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value by themselves, since they use that life to further an end they regard as of supreme importance – proving that life is a disvalue. There is thus a fallacy of division at work in the pessimist argument as well. Life is judged bad as a whole, but good in the particular instance of the pessimist’s own life, seemingly just because it happens to be their own. This fallacy proves that life as such cannot be without value, as the pessimist argues, because they continue to live it, not on the basis of instinct, but because they want to realize their philosophical project. This project is not only subjectively good, but, in so far as it is shared with others for their good, objectively good as well. In their practical, if not theoretical, affirmation of the value of their own lives, the pessimists unwittingly reveal a caring and nurturing disposition towards others’ lives. This proves that they really do value life, their more provocative claims notwithstanding. The pessimist could rejoin that they apply the same standards to themselves as they do to others, that since they are human they are subject to the same sorts of self-deceptions as others. I will grant them this much: that they are subject to the same sorts of self-deception. Thus, if all that is involved in continuing to live is self-deception, my argument would be unsound. However, it is clear that there is more to a philosophical life committed to making arguments against the universal value of life than evolutionary self-deception. When we care and concern ourselves about our own individual life, we care and concern ourselves with what makes it good, the enjoyed realization of our core human capacities. The enjoyed realization of our capacities has material conditions: access to the natural resources, social institutions, and social relationships necessary to our existence as individuals. We do not know these facts by instinct, but discover them by thinking critically about our own life and its conditions. Moreover, we are not only concerned with life’s conditions of maintenance; insofar as we undertake a project, we are also thinking about how we can realize our goals. In this case, one of the goals I want to realize (my good) is to write a book that others will presumably read and learn from (their good). The example illustrates a general point: if I care about my own good, I care about making myself real and valuable for others. My own good is inextricably bound

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up with both that of others and conscious effort. The pessimist’s choosing life and self-realization cannot be explained as evolutioninduced self-deception. There is no doubt that life contains disvalue, but those disvalues do not destroy the desire to live. That the desire to live persists even when we honestly acknowledge the worst that life can offer proves that the object of that desire – life – is not only subjectively valued, but objectively valuable. Yet, perhaps these matters are too important to trust to individual reasoning alone. Let us therefore inquire as to whether the judgments of other people can provide further support for this critique of pessimism. Our lives are not lived alone but in both instrumental and mutualistic interaction and relationship with other people. Human lives are lived in social fields of life-development. A social field is more than “a structural relationship of dependence” between parts.39 Social fields are structures of values that “constitute the human meaning of our individual and collective lives within this wide range of material possibility and choice.”40 The structural definition of field might be adequate for the material elements that make up the natural field of life-support. The human beings whose development depends upon these social fields normally desire to contribute to or improve them as valued members. Our lives are valuable not only because we as individuals value them; they are also objectively valuable to the extent that other people with whom we interact value us for the contributions that we make through our non-alienated labour to collective well-being. Thus, the judgments of other people help to confirm the subjective judgment we make about ourselves. The objective value of our own life is confirmed when others judge us to be valuable. People value others as workers, as family members, friends, and lovers. We become conscious of the value of our own lives not in Narcissus’s pool but in the mirror of others’ care and concern and love for us. McMurtry calls this virtuous circle of contribution and appropriation of life-enabling goods the “human ecology of vocation”: “The vocation of each individual is to do what s/he can that is of life-value to others and of life-interest to self. For none to shirk the duty of giving back in to what enables the humanity of each is the obligation in return for these rights – the human ordering of social justice. These are the true bases of self-respect and

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freedom. The value of such work for others, in turn, is defined by its contribution to the provision of the universal goods each and all require to live as human.”41 The value of our lives is thus not the product of self-deception, but a rational subjective judgment supported by objective conditions: our enjoyment, the good that our experiences and activities contribute, and the confirming judgments of others. Our subjective judgment cannot be pure self-deception if it is also confirmed in others’ truthful valuations of us as important contributors to their life, and social life generally. If someone loves us, there is something lovable in us, and actual love is confirmation of this objective value. No philosophical argument can refute our lovability if we are loved, since love is objective recognition of the lovability of the person loved. The pessimists might respond that the example of love proves only that human beings have an instinct to reproduce and that our actual, subjective individual lives are not of intrinsic value but only a vehicle for the perpetuation of the species.42 Even if it is the case that the individual is in some sense “used” by the species, our desire to be loved is not identical to the instinct to reproduce. The needs to which they respond are distinct. The motivation to make these efforts to make oneself lovable is anchored in the felt human need to be valued and loved by others quite independently of any sexual or reproductive connection. Take the example of friendship: friends desire to be valued by their friends without any overt and controlling sexual interest. Those who cannot form any friendships or any attachments at all because they are incapable of emotional reciprocity lead isolated lives, and isolated lives can often prove unbearable. As Durkheim discovered, lack of feelings of being cared for and valued is a primary cause of suicide. However, I would call this form of suicide “pathological,” not the consequence of a rational interpretation of life as such as without value. Suicide from loneliness is rather an act of despair by one who has become alienated from mutualistic relationships of valuing and being valued.43 The pessimistic position ignores the role that human sociality plays in making life worth living. When the troubles that stalk human life can be faced together with others who care, the troubles cease to be only troubles and become occasions for affirmative political and

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social struggles (or, in the personal domain, moments of deeper love and support, as I will explain in more detail in chapter 4). In social life too, systematic deprivation that persists even over generations has rarely been regarded as a reason to commit mass suicide, to lament ever having been born, or to stop having children. On the contrary, structures of deprivation have been regarded as social and political problems to be solved through mass struggle. Through these mass struggles, people prove that they care about each other, the quality of their lives, and a free future for their children even if they have to die fighting for it. Individuals do not suffer poverty, oppression, exploitation, and alienation as metaphysical evils, but as failures of social organization. Such failures can be addressed by changing the ruling value system and dominant institutions. Just as individuals furnished with appropriate support are capable of bearing pain and passing through it to higher levels of understanding and achievement, so too are societies capable of understanding their problems and bearing the pain of struggle and revolution. Through this pain, they create new forms of organization more comprehensively inclusive of the universal interests of each in being able to satisfy the natural and social conditions of good lives. The idea of the future as an open horizon of possibility receptive to struggles to expand life-value grounds the collective strength needed to bear the pains of working for social change. Not all of life’s pains are disvaluable. Growth towards higher levels of insight, understanding, and capacity realization requires that the subject bear growth pains as constitutive elements of their human good. In every case of pain, therefore, one must ask whether it contributes to growth and development or whether it damages and diminishes life-capacities overall. There is a difference between pains that are intrinsic, constitutive conditions of the human good, conditions that shape and limit what we are capable of achieving but that are not bad just because they limit us, and extrinsic impediments placed on our life-horizons by oppressive social powers. Where life is made subjectively or objectively disvaluable for extrinsic reasons, it does not follow that life as such is disvaluable. Life in oppressive conditions might be bad, but it can be made better. As for intrinsic frames of finitude, the pains they cause can be borne and eliminated through

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philosophical understanding and conscious effort to live the life we have well. At the end of Adam’s tour of the horrors of mortal life he overcomes his terror and agrees with the Archangel Michael’s advice: “What thou liv’st, live well.”44 However, if it is true that life can be improved through collective and individual effort, it is important to ask whether there really are intrinsic limitations to how much better it can be made. If it is true that life can be made better in particular instances, perhaps it follows that, over the long term, science can overcome all causes of pain and suffering. If that were the case, then it may be the case that my distinction between intrinsic limitations and extrinsic impediments to self-realization is too conservative, or even incoherent. This is the argument of a range of technotopian thinkers that I will explore in the next chapter. They grant that frail, finite, and mortal human life might not be worth living, but rejoin that we have the power to overcome all finite limitations and thus that life can be made worth living, forever.

chapter 2

If Life Is Worth Living, Is It Worth Living Forever? Prior to the discovery of dna, science had to accept the difference between extrinsic limitations and intrinsic constraints. Now, for a growing body of technotopian philosophers and scientists, from cautiously optimistic liberal defenders of genetic engineering to transhumanist visionaries, what I have identified as intrinsic constraints on life-capacity expression are just extrinsic constraints whose causes are not yet fully understood. My critique of pessimism turned on the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic limitations on the good of life. As a critique of pessimism, it seems vulnerable to the objection that the distinction between extrinsic limitations and intrinsic constraints on the realization of the good of human life is itself pessimistic and in conflict with the scientific and political powers of human beings to fundamentally change their conditions of life. Genomics has made it possible to think of life as the execution of a mechanical program that can be instrumentally altered. The technological transformation of human life seems fully in keeping with my materialist approach to life’s value. Marx argued that “industry is the open book of human essential powers,” while the demand to reconcile ourselves to the constraints of our finitude has typically been associated with conservative priests trying to keep the oppressed from struggling to change their conditions of life.1 Marx meant that the specific difference of human being is our individual and collective capacity for world-making labour. Marx, it would seem, would be a transhumanist were he alive today.2 Developing this line of thought into a political program, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams try to reconcile the traditions of revolutionary socialism and technotopianism, arguing that “the full development of [human] freedom … demands experimentation with collective and technological

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augmentation, and a spirit that refuses to accept any barrier as natural and inevitable.”3 From this perspective, progress has always meant technological progress, and the history of human freedom as the power to realize our capacities has always been advanced by the development of technology. The project of human liberation should not fear technological development, but democratize it and let it flower to the fullest. What I will call the technotopian argument, or technotopianism, rests on a basic principle that life is the mechanical execution of a program that is separable from its biological embodiment. The technotopians assume that the capacities that make life worth living are all species of information processing, separate from the biological foundations and limitations of organic life. Technotopians assume that expected increases in processing power are good, equating more with better. They conclude that any limitation on human capacities is bad and an unjustifiable impediment to the good life. Any means of removing any limitation, even means that would do away with materially embodied organic life itself, are regarded as good. This chapter will show that technotopianism has more in common with pessimism than is initially obvious: the two views are two sides of the same coin. Both are rooted in false assumptions about the meaning and value of human life, ones that fail adequately to appreciate that meaning and value for us humans is inextricably bound to what I have been calling the frames of human finitude.

2.1 Science, Transhumanism, and Egocentric Life-Value Liberal defenders of genetic engineering and transhumanists assume that the biological foundation of human life is flawed because it depends upon maintaining connections to a nature it does not control, it is liable to disease, it prevents individuals from realizing every capacity they could imagine a good life realizing, and it is mortal. “Your body is a death trap,” writes leading transhumanist philosopher Nick Bostrom, implying, by his diction, that one would have to be irrational to not want to free oneself from it, should that prove

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possible.4 Given these purported flaws, liberal eugenicists and transhumanists agree that technological “enhancement” of the human being is a necessary condition of the full realization of human lives. Bostrom defines enhancement as “an intervention that improves the functioning of an organism beyond its reference state, or that creates an entirely new function or subsystem that the organism previously lacked.”5 Liberal eugenicists differ from transhumanists insofar as they do not speculate about the transcendence of human biology altogether and sometimes warn about the possible dangers of the ultimate transhumanist goal of replacing biological human beings with cybernetic intelligences.6 However, both liberal eugenicists and transhumanists believe that biological flaws can be engineered out of existence, and that good lives require some degree of technologically mediated enhancement. Defenders of technologically enhanced humans believe that they are serving the interests of life in both its political and individual dimensions. Politically, technotopians look to genetic changes to solve the fundamental conflicts of human history. For example, Jonathan Glover is incredulous that anyone could question the value of genetic engineering because it promises to end to the brutality of human nature: “It is less easy to sympathise with opposition to the principle of changing our nature. Preserving the human race as it is will seem a responsible option to all those who can watch television and feel satisfied with the world. It will appeal to those who can talk to their children about the history of the twentieth century without wishing they could leave some things out.”7 Glover clearly affirms a principle I’ve been arguing for throughout this book, that life is better the freer we are to realize our core human capacities. However, he assumes without argument that the primary impediment to their full and free realization is genetic, despite the fact that the major political crimes of the twentieth century had nothing to do with our genetic program, but with geopolitical and economic competition and clashing value systems. Gandhi and Hitler had the same genes but different values, and values can be changed through struggle and argument. At the level of the individual, technotopians hope to realize total health and immortality, a dream of humanity since the Epic of Gilgamesh.8 Descartes is one of the first and most articulate defenders of

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the link between science and health. Writing in the Discourse on Method, he set science the task of making human beings the “lords and possessors of nature” through the invention of “an infinity of arts” that would “enable us to enjoy, without any trouble, the fruits of the earth … and for the conservation of health … which is … of all the blessings of this life … the first and fundamental one”9 (emphasis added). Descartes does not define health, but given his mechanistic understanding of the body, it is safe to infer that he means a state of optimal physical functioning to be attained by the application of science to the human organism. Improving health would mean improving performance, and improving performance would mean improving the power of bodies to attain the ends that minds direct their bodies to pursue. Similarly, the transhumanists contend that social progress can be measured by the elaboration of technical strategies for eliminating the causes of suffering and incapacity. As the Transhumanist Declaration asserts, “Humanity stands to be profoundly affected by science and technology in the future. We envision the possibility of broadening human potential by overcoming aging, cognitive shortcomings, involuntary suffering, and our confinement to planet Earth.”10 Unpacking these values, Max More seems to establish a close connection between the transhumanist ideal of life freed from its biological and social constraints and the conception of life-value central to my argument. Indeed, he defines transhumanism as “a life philosophy … [not based in] any supernatural or physically transcendent belief [but] … instead emphasizing a meaningful and ethical approach to living informed by reason, science, progress, and … on taking personal charge of creating better futures … [through] reason, technology, scientific method, and human creativity rather than faith.”11 More’s transhumanism – indeed, the technotopian argument generally – does operate with an idea of life-value, but with an egocentric and hedonistic interpretation of it that I will reject. I will justify that rejection in section 2.3. At this point let us examine the technotopian critique of biological life.12

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2.2 The Infirmities of Biological Life 2.2.1 Dependence on Nature All living organisms depend on resources outside of themselves. The ground of all life and self-realization is to establish and maintain connection with what enables life, but this is also a fundamental vulnerability. Organisms must expend time and energy finding the energy sources they physiologically require. For human beings, time expended in the struggle for existence is time that is not spent developing our higher capacities. But, if unhindered by biological constraints, humans could devote more life time to the realization of their higher capacities. There would no longer be any material necessity tying human life down to the maintenance of necessary connections to the natural field of life-support. The struggle to free life from its biological basis today is a matter of science, not science fiction. The inventor and computer scientist Ray Kurzweil has the most ambitious and utopian recorded plans for overcoming human biological dependence on the natural environment. For Kurzweil, all the core human capacities to which we are likely to assign intrinsic value – loving, interpreting, understanding, creating, inventing – are essentially different permutations of the capacity of the brain to process information. Until the development of computing machines, it seemed as though this informationprocessing capacity was a unique property of biological material organized over billions of years of evolution into a brain. However, the invention of computing machines and their rapid increase in processing power have proven that biological systems are, in comparison with computers, highly inefficient and slow, wasting most of their computing capacity on intrinsically valueless biological operations. “Most of the complexity of a human neuron,” Kurzweil argues, “is devoted to maintaining its life-support functions, not its information processing capabilities. Ultimately, we will be able to port our mental processes to a more suitable computational substrate. Then our minds will not have to stay so small.”13 How large can they grow? Infinitely large, if Hans Moravec is correct. He envisages a future in which the entire material universe has become a

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virtual reality inside a computing machine, an event which Kurzweil refers to as “the singularity.” All biological dependence on natural and social worlds would be overcome at this point and all biological limits to desire satisfaction and pleasure experience abolished. Moravec explains: “Because it uses resources so much more efficiently, a mature cyberspace will be effectively much bigger and longer lasting than the raw spacetime it displaces. Only an infinitesimal fraction of normal matter does work that is of interest to thinking beings like us. In a well-developed cyberspace every tiniest mote will be part of a relevant computation or storing of significant data.”14 For Moravec and Kurzweil, what makes life good is the purely “mental” or “computational” functions of symbol production, interpretation, and manipulation. In reflecting upon the ethical implications of the technotopian argument, I will set aside any skeptical doubts about the technological feasibility of Kurzweil’s project, as well as any criticisms of the functionalist philosophy of mind that underlies it.15 The main issue is not whether it will someday be possible to upload our consciousness onto a computer. Rather, like Dupuy and Roure, I am concerned with “the effects of the ideas that draw technology on,” which, I will argue, rest upon a problematic disposition towards and interpretation of the nature and value of life.16 This interpretation will affect the way intelligence and social resources are mobilized to solve fundamental problems. There is a fundamental irony at the centre of this purported “life philosophy.” It urges us to give our political struggle over to a technological program whose goal is to overcome the biology that is the real foundation of human life. Life philosophy of any sort must start from recognition of what life actually is – metabolic functioning, reproductive interaction, resource appropriation, habitat protection, world-creation (in the case of human beings) – and ground itself in that continuum of survival, maintenance, and creative activity. Technology plays a role in the protection and enhancement of life, but what the technotopians are demanding is not the protection and enhancement of life, but ultimately its replacement. Technotopian enhancement is thus not merely improvement of biological systems, but rather the overcoming of the dependencies and infirmities of biological systems,

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for the sake of an unlimited power to consume and process pleasureinducing informational content. 2.2.2 Liability to Disease Few will disagree that liability to disease is a serious limitation on the goodness of human life and that science should devote every effort to overcoming it. Rare is the person who lives beyond infancy who does not suffer the pains, the debilitating weakness, the desire-sapping ravages of acute or chronic disease. If anyone is fortunate enough to be spared all experience of serious disease, they will most likely have had to suffer alongside a gravely ill loved one. Such an experience is in some ways worse than the physical ailment, given the psychic torment caused by feelings of helplessness at not being able to comfort one’s beloved. This inner torment is often exacerbated because one’s care for the suffering beloved can be accompanied by a selfish sense of relief that it is someone else who is suffering. Egocentric pleasure is the core of the technotopian conception of human good. The more decisive the check on pleasure, the worse it will appear in the ethics of human enhancement. From the standpoint of aspirational future enhancement, the existing body often appears as nothing but a platform for suffering and debilitating disease. David Pearce argues that, as presently constituted, human life is typically miserable, violent, painful, and too often cut short or ruined by mental and physical illness. The essential goal of medical science, biotechnology, and computer and robotic engineering is to come together in a grand scientific-technical alliance against the liability of the flesh to disease and suffering. Eventually, he hopes, “genetic engineering and nanotechnology will eliminate aversive experience from the living world. Over the next thousand years or so, the biological substrate of suffering will be eradicated completely. ‘Physical’ and ‘mental’ pain alike are destined to disappear into evolutionary history. The biochemistry of everyday discontents will be genetically phased out too. Malaise will be replaced by the biochemistry of bliss. Matter and energy will be sculpted into life-loving super-beings animated by gradients of well-being.”17 According to Pearce’s “hedo-

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nistic imperative,” “aversive experiences” are always negations of possible life-value. For the technotopians, the growth of life-value depends upon support for any strategy that promises to cure disease. Genetic engineering, if free from conservative interference, will both cure disease and help create better humans. Support for the growth of life-value thus seems to entail support for genetic engineering, which is often demanded in the name of moral obligation. For James Hughes, the obligation is also political: “The use of germinal choice and genetic enhancement to ensure greater health and ability is warranted by three concerns. First, we are obliged by our concern for those citizens whose cancers and dementias we prevent. Second, we have obligations to reduce the burden and costs of disease and stunted ability on society. Third, we have an obligation to encourage as wide an adoption of enhancements as possible in order to minimise the inequalities that result from both natural genetic endowments and unequal access to genetic enhancement.”18 Hughes thus converts the very bedrock of human social connection – care and concern for others – into an obligation to support one particular direction of biomedical research. The language of moral obligation goes further. Kyle Oskvig argues that a known, safe means of genetically engineering stronger and more intelligent people would obligate each individual to undergo the treatment: “If some cybernetic enhancement could be done with minimal damage to appearance and other goods – if our character could hold up to it, if the financial and social costs are negligible, etc., – then it would seem there is a moral obligation to undergo the procedure, and become a better human being.”19 Julian Savulescu extends this obligation to parents, who owe it to their children to have them enhanced. Because parents owe their children the best possible future, Savulescu maintains, they are morally obliged to provide any genetic enhancement that becomes available that is proven safe and effective. “Medicine has changed evolution – we can now select individuals who experience less pain and disease. The next stage of human evolution may be rational evolution, where we select children who not only have the greatest chance of surviving, reproducing,

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and being free of disease, but who also have the greatest opportunities to have the best lives … Enhancement … in so far as it promotes well-being, is the very essence of what is necessary for a good human life.”20 Glover too looks to genetic engineering as the means to “spare” future generations the apparently unbearable and valueless pains of disability. “If it were possible,” he argues, “to use genetic engineering to correct defects [he gives the example of Huntington’s disease and spina bifida] say, at the foetal stage, it is hard to see how those of us who are prepared to use the genetic measures … could object. In such cases it would be pure gain.”21 However, there are few if any cases where technologies sold as being “pure gains” for the value of human life do not also bring with them costs that were initially hidden.22 Like the more prosaic defenders of liberal-capitalist consumer society, technotopians are quick to respond to criticisms of their program that it is selfish or blindly Promethean with the claim that it is anchored in liberal and feminist values of choice and “reproductive freedom.” As Joseph Jackson argues, “as long as the individual is free to decide whether to alter the trait in question, it is hard to accept the proposition that a moral wrong occurs when s/he chooses to alleviate his/her suffering, or simply does what is most convenient … [interfering with the right to make those choices] would be paternalistic.”23 The implication of his argument is that anyone who opposes the project for the re-engineering of the human genome and the eventual transcendence of the flesh altogether is both totalitarian and anti-woman. When one looks hard, however, one always finds market commodities, and therefore market forces, behind the structuring social context of “free choice.” Princeton geneticist Lee Silver, for example, warns that attempts to interfere with genetic engineering are doomed to fail because, in the end, the financial incentives to successfully cure diseases are too enormous. “Whether we like it or not,” he says, “the global marketplace will reign supreme.”24 Thus, it is better to support the research to ensure that at least some of its benefits remain in the public domain, for the alternative is not an end to the research, but the exclusive control of its fruits by private business.

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An argument that begins from a defence of egocentric pleasure ends up as an argument about the irresistibility of market forces, and the irresistibility of market forces leads us to the conclusion that whether we think it is a good idea or not, we must allow the development of technologies that will not only cure disease, but overcome our liability to disease entirely. From the technotopian perspective, there is no difference between treating disease after the fact and preventing disease in the first place, and no difference between preventing disease by methods that work with existing biology (e.g., healthy eating, exercise) and changing that biology through genetic engineering, or eliminating it entirely (by uploading our consciousness into Moravec’s mature cyberspace). The technotopians reject these distinctions, and the distinction between extrinsic impediments and intrinsic constraints on the good of realizing core human capacities, because for them the ends are everything, the means nothing. 2.2.3 Capacity Realization beyond the Finite Horizons of Embodied Being For the technotopians, the negative limitations on our power to transform theory to practice, longing to pleasure, goal to realization, imposed by dependence on nature and liability to disease are but contingent expressions of a more fundamental problem with biological life. The set of core human capacities that define us has emerged from blind evolutionary forces, while our imaginations, taking in the whole world of nature and even supernatural fantasy, enable us to explore currently unattainable possibilities: flying with our arms, breathing underwater without scuba tanks, thinking at the speed of a super-computer. Insofar as the technotopians regard thwarted desires as “aversive experiences,” biological incapacity is regarded as a harmful limitation. Since our capacities for experience and activity, as well as our lifetimes, are finite, we must choose between different possible courses of life. When we make a choice we foreclose, permanently, on the possibility of experiencing what a different choice would have realized. Even if we assume away all extrinsic impediments to the formation

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and realization of goals, experience teaches that no matter how much effort we expend in cultivating them, we eventually reach the limits of our ability to refine the expression of our capacities. Choices generate path-dependencies. The longer we pursue the development and realization of one set of life-capacities, the more difficult it becomes to fundamentally alter our defining life-projects. The facts of human finitude mean that for any human being, there will be a practically infinite set of experiences and activities it would have been good to experience, but which must remain materially unrealized and unrealizable. The project of the human enhancers is to end this apparently intolerable constriction of possibilities. They anchor their hopes in a metaphysical interpretation of evolution according to which there is a universal tendency impelling life towards higher degrees of power and intelligence. Kurzweil speaks of the “law of accelerating returns,” a quasi-natural force impelling technological developments forward at exponential rates of growth.25 Max More, in a related vein, coined the term “extropy” to describe the way in which the technological achievements of intelligent life counteract the natural force of entropy. He defines it as “more intelligence, wisdom, and effectiveness, an open-ended life-space, and the removal of political, cultural, biological, and physiological limits to continuing development. Perpetually overcoming constraints on our progress and possibilities as individuals.”26 Thus, the technotopian conception of the good could be defined as unlimited capacity realization in any and all ways that can be imagined to be interesting and pleasurable to the individual. This conception of the good cannot be advanced by social and political struggle alone, because even the most progressive struggles against extrinsic limits on human capacity enjoyment would leave the biological basis of finitude – and the unhappiness and dissatisfaction it causes the technoptopians – unchanged. Our power to realize the good of unlimited expression and enjoyment of our capacities would instead be advanced primarily through expert scientific work. Max More again puts the point clearly: “Extropy involves strongly affirming the value of science and technology. It means using practical methods to advance the goals of expanded intelligence, superior physical capabilities, psychological refinement, social advance, and indefinite life-spans.”27

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To overcome the extrinsic limitations on the expression and enjoyment of our core human capacities, collective political struggle might be appropriate. Winning the real battle against the finite powers of embodied life requires turning leadership over to the scientists, for victory over the limitations imposed by the intrinsic constitutive conditions of human life presupposes success in “making human nature a project of technical mastery.”28 Once again, however, a supposedly libertarian life philosophy that legitimates itself by appeal to the bedrock value of choice hopes for a future in which people never have to really choose. A philosophy that conceives of the good as unconstrained realization of human desires allies itself with technological forces that would abolish the human individuals in whose supposed interests those forces are developed and advanced. Standing behind those technological forces is the money-value that drives the capitalist economy. The very developments that the technotopians promise are, ultimately, not the creations of ingenious scientists, but the reified forces of capitalism. For More and for Kurzweil, it is money-value growth, and not philanthropic concern with the alleviation of suffering, that is the real social driver of research. Thus, More argues that “continual improvement will require economic growth.” Kurzweil is even more explicit, no doubt because he is fundamentally a business person and entrepreneur, that his socalled law of accelerating returns is not technological, but economic: “It is the economic imperative of a competitive marketplace that is the primary force driving technology forward and fueling the law of accelerating returns.”29 He goes further. Unless inventors can be assured maximum monetary returns on their invention through secure intellectual property rights, the movement towards the transhuman future will be derailed. “If the primary value of products and services resides in their information, then the protection of information rights will be critical to the business model that provides the capital to fuel the creation of valuable information.”30 His position is repeated by former US president Obama, who in announcing the brain (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) project argued that “ideas are what power our economy … we do innovation better than anybody else – and that makes our economy stronger. When we invest in the best ideas before anybody

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else does, our businesses and our workers can make the best products and deliver the best services before anybody else.”31 If money is going to be found to fund the research, consumers must be manufactured to buy the products. If consumers are to be manufactured to buy the products, they must be convinced that their lives are currently lacking whatever the genetic engineering firm is selling. Aubrey de Grey, a leading transhumanist biogerontologist, thus concludes his book on the biochemistry of aging with an overt appeal for money for his foundation.32 The belief that everyone needs enhancement to be happy stems from uncritical acceptance of the psychology of consumer desire. As one can see from the environmental consequences of unconstrained consumption, consumer desire is insatiable; boredom with one product is cured by buying another, and so on, ad infinitum. The technotopians believe that there is a technological fix for the infinite deferral of fulfillment: literally re-engineered to become immortal information processers, human beings would longer need to forgo any pleasure. The ultimate horizon of human enhancement is an unlimited life of unlimited self-realization in an unlimited virtual reality. Only through abolishing the material world and the biological body completely can the fantasy of the fully satisfied consumer be realized. Only in a programmed virtual reality can one be anything one desires at one moment, and then something completely different at another moment, forever, without fear of death. In virtual reality, there is no difference between world and will, no irrevocable choices, path dependencies, or limits of any sort, intrinsic or extrinsic, to the satisfaction of desires, because there will be no death. 2.2.4 Overcoming Death and the Material Independence of Nature from Will The first step towards the liberation of our power to process information from its biological substrate is to extend our lives long enough to be able to take advantage of the nanorobotic and artificial intelligence “upgrades” that will be available in the future. Aubrey de Grey, mentioned above, argues that all the major causes

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of senescence are currently understood well enough to permit theorizing about how they might be engineered out of existence. Practical immortality is thus no longer a theoretical problem, according to de Grey, but only a matter of technical capacity, devotion to the cause, and willingness and ability to pay. The key to winning what he calls the war on aging is “longevity escape velocity”: the degree of success with current medical treatment of diseases that would allow us to benefit from the next technological breakthroughs. “The key conclusion of the logic I have laid out,” he argues, “is that there is a threshold rate of biomedical progress that will allow us to stave off aging indefinitely … This will allow us to escape agerelated decline indefinitely, however old we become, in purely chronological terms.”33 Attaining longevity escape velocity might enable us to “live long enough to live forever” but on its own is insufficient to overcome human finitude.34 Life extension could simply lead to very old people living an unlimited amount of time, still confined by some intrinsic limits imposed by their organism. To overcome human finitude, we would need to free our human intelligence and world-creating powers from their present biological basis. In order to achieve this technotopian apotheosis, not only the material body – the seat and origin of desire – but the material universe – the ground of satisfaction and ultimate limit on individual desire – must be overcome. Technotopianism treats the human body as nothing more than a “physical manifestation” of our true self, which is not a soul in the theological sense, but a centralized information-processing capacity in principle not bound by the constraints of human biology or the limits that material nature impose on living individuals. It is not enough to simply re-engineer the human body to make it stronger, because it could never be made fully invulnerable to the immense forces of the natural world. The only solution to biological finitude is to re-engineer the material world out of existence too. If both the body and the world are subject to control “at a whim” because they are both now programmed virtual realities, there remains no material barrier to the immediate realization of will, the endless revisability of choices, and thus the supersession of all constraints on life-path and identity.

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We thus return to the point that overcoming the dependence of biological systems on nature requires the abolition of both biological systems and nature as the life-sustaining environment of biological life. According to the technotopians, the abolition of both biological systems and nature is the abolition of all spatial and temporal constraints on intelligence. Under this system, there would be no real past, because events could be reprogrammed to suit any present purpose whatsoever. There would be no real future, because openness and uncertainty as to what will transpire would be negated. Past and future would be replaced by an infinite present in which the superintelligence decides what will happen: “The lives and worlds absorbed into the cyberspace expansion will provide not only starting points for unimaginably many tales about possible futures, but an astronomically voluminous archaeological record from which to infer the past … Entire world histories, with all their living, feeling inhabitants, will be recreated in cyberspace.”35 For the technotopians, a truly good life demands the transcendence of the material difference between world and will. The “autopotent” superintelligences Bostrom projects will “have complete power over and operational understanding of themselves, so they are able to remold themselves at will and assume any state they choose … These super-intelligences will have thorough control over their environments so that they can make materially exact copies of objects and implement any physical design.”36 Although not subject to the frames of human finitude, although supposedly capable of forms of pleasure we cannot currently understand, these future superintelligences are supposedly continuous enough with us that we should accept them as the model we ought to pursue. Bostrom argues that we should try to preserve the best elements of human nature.37 Kurzweil too emphasizes the continuity between the biological and the cybernetic intelligence he hopes that biological life will grow into: “To me being human means being part of a civilization that seeks to extend its boundaries.”38 Yet, if everything can be replayed, reinvented, undone, and redone, we are unmooring ourselves from the constraints that are crucial to meaningful life and the human good that the technotopians claim to serve.

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2.3 The Onto-ethical Contradictions of Technotopianism The technotopian project has spawned opposition, much of it from a conservative perspective that focuses on the threat that genetic engineering poses to human dignity. While my own argument does not rest upon a conservative critique of science in the name of traditional or religious values, it does share conservatives’ fear that something about the dignity of human being is at stake in the transhumanist project. Whereas for the conservative the defence of dignity is a conclusion, for my critique it is a starting point. 2.3.1 Human Enhancement and the Violation of the Dignity of Human Nature In the conservative articulation of the threat of the transhumanist project to human dignity, human nature is given prior to choice: our genetic code, the basic shape and capacities of the body it builds, perhaps too our temperament and disposition. The important point is that human nature is not endlessly variable under different cultural and social and technological conditions. While some defenders of conservative positions see the givenness of human nature as the work of a god, the position is compatible with secular interpretations of conservatism, as indeed it is consistent with certain interpretations of Marxist materialism.39 The fact that human nature is not an artifact of human invention but a product of physical forces and natural history beyond our control (at least up until now) establishes a prima facie case, the conservatives claim, for leaving it alone. Michael Sandel captures this dimension of the problem clearly. “The main problem with enhancement and genetic engineering,” he writes, “is that they … represent a kind of hyper-agency, a Promethean aspiration to remake nature, including human nature, to serve our purposes and satisfy our desires. The problem is the drive to mastery. And what the drive to mastery misses, and may even destroy, is our appreciation for the gifted character of human powers and achievements.”40 Respect for human nature in this view means that we should leave it alone, conserve rather than re-engineer it. Even the mildest defenders of enhancement violate this respect for the given. “The problem,”

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Sandel continues, “is the unlimited hubris of the designing parents, or their drive to master the mystery of birth. Even if this disposition does not make parents tyrants of their children, it disfigures the relationship between parent and child, and deprives the parents of the humility and enlarged human sympathies that openness to the unbidden can cultivate.”41 To treat human nature as infinitely plastic is to risk destroying it. Let us call the dignity invoked by the conservative argument the basic dignity of the constitutive biological conditions of human life and activity. The argument that it should not be treated as an object of instrumental redesign is analogous to the argument that the owner of a work of art should not destroy it or alter it. Even though it is their property, the owner did not create the work and must honour and respect the creator’s efforts by preserving its original appearance. Assuming the piece was not bought for purely commercial purposes, the owner recognizes something in its aesthetic integrity that makes a claim that it be conserved. An analogous claim holds with regard to the conservative understanding of the basic dignity of the given aspects of human nature. Human nature has its own complex ontoethical integrity that demands respect. Respect entails we preserve it as is, rather than redesign it as if it were a room to be refurnished as fashions change. There is an important ethical truth in this argument, but its conservative articulation runs aground because it does not define the given element in human nature clearly. Francis Fukuyama, for example, tries to isolate what grounds the dignity of humanity by a process of elimination, following historical abstraction of the moral value of humans from the concrete differences that mark them. Since the French Revolution, dignity has been transformed from a property of aristocratic conduct to a universal property of human beings as such. That is, human beings have dignity not because they are women or men or black or white or gay or transsexual, but because they are equally human beings. Yet for Fukuyama, the ground of our all being equal objects of moral respect turns out to be unnameable: “What the demand for equality of recognition implies is that if we strip all of a person’s contingent and accidental properties away, there re-

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mains some essential human quality underneath that is worthy of a certain minimal level of respect – call it Factor X.”42 This vagueness has been seized upon by technotopians as grounds to reject the conservative argument. Bostrom, for example, works through a long and by no means consistent list of historical definitions of dignity, to support his claim that there is no proof that radically altering human nature will violate whatever it is that constitutes our dignity. He argues that “the worry, which has been variously expressed, is that these technologies might undermine our human dignity, or individuality evokes something that is deeply valuable about human being but that it is difficult to put into words or to factor into a cost-benefit analysis.”43 Without a precise definition of the ground of human dignity, it is impossible to rule out the possibility that enhancement might actually enhance it. If we leave the dignity resting on the ineffable ground of a mysterious Factor X, or even the idea of the given in general as what we have not altered or created, Bostrom has a point. Moreover, since in the course of history our biology has been changed in manifold ways by changes of diet, exercise, and therapeutic medicine, and these changes have not been regarded as violations of dignity, a more precise explanation of the ground of human dignity is required. The conservative argument in fact contains a more determinate foundation for human dignity: the form of embodied life-activity. Our lives are essentially challenges, and our dignity is bound up with our willingness to meet these challenges. Dignity is thus not so much a fixed element or property of human beings, but a form of lifeactivity that emerges in a willingness to meet essential challenges. Early life is a challenge of finding out what our bodies can do, or what our core human capacities are. Once we have determined these capacities, we need to form specific projects to realize them, through the cultivation of specific talents, abilities, relationships, and experiences. The formulation of these life-plans involves reflection upon their impact on other people and the natural world, which challenges us to develop plans that will be valuable for and valued by others, now and into the open-ended future. We then must struggle to realize our projects within our given social circumstances, which could require

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us to challenge the established structure of rule and its governing value system. But were the extrinsic constraints of our social circumstances completely removed, the intrinsic constraints of our human finitude would of necessity remain. Dignified life-activity is the struggle to realize our projects in the face of ever-possible failure. The challenges posed by our intrinsically finite powers and knowledge are thus necessary to our human dignity. Effort, not victory, commands respect. The use of performanceenhancing drugs to guarantee success against “clean” opponents would be unobjectionable if we only cared about ends and not means. But “there remains a sense in which the ‘naturalness’ of means [to our ends] matters. It lies not in the fact that assisting drugs and devices are artefacts, but in the danger of violating or deforming the nature of human agency and the dignity of the naturally human way of activity.”44 The point of sports is to compete, rather than to win at any cost, and competition is essentially effort expended against an opponent and not technological superiority. Dignified performance, then, is primarily a struggle to push one’s own body as far as it can go without engineered supplementation against other people competing in the same way. No one would watch a human run a race against a top-fuel dragster. It is often the case that losers who are judged to have played beyond their expected capacities, to have “given 110 per cent” as the cliché goes, are more respected and honoured for their effort than the victors for their victory. The centrality of effort to dignified performance is inseparable from the uncertainty of outcomes. Let us stick with sports for a moment. The drama in baseball depends on uncertainty. If every batter were machine-built to hit a home run at every bat, no matter what the pitcher did, baseball as a sport would be destroyed. The attraction of sport, as almost everything of value in the pursuit of our projects, depends upon unpredictability of the outcome. The sigh of disappointment when the batter pops out is as genuine and life-valuable an expression of human emotion as the elation caused by a home run. Engineer the former possibility out of existence, and you have reduced, not enhanced, the scope of valuable human emotional response, along with destroying baseball. This conclusion can be generalized to the entire technotopian project.

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Like athletes who use performance-enhancing drugs, technotopians abstract results from work and identify the former as independently valuable. Yet, where in human history do we find cheaters celebrated? Where in human history do we not see the underdog championed? Where in human history do we not see monuments erected to the courage to resist even in the face of hopeless odds? Nowhere. What does this answer tell us about the dignity of human life? It tells us that it is no mere conceit of life-value philosophy to argue that the dignity of life is an expression of people’s willingness to face up to its twofold challenges. We can also appeal to the testimony of our own experience. What sort of achievement feels best? Surely not successful respiration, which a well-functioning autonomous nervous system takes care of without any effort on our part? Now consider solving a difficult mathematical problem, sweating with friends to carry a large piece of furniture up a tight stairwell without damaging it or the walls, forging a new friendship in a strange city, and passing a test that initially seemed insurmountable. Only the practices that require effort on our part are truly valued, because they demand that we meet a challenge set by structures and forces not entirely under our control. The dignity of life is inseparable from the strength of character required to meet these sorts of challenges. Our capacity to celebrate failure if the battle has been wellfought, our capacity to value effort and hard work, the lack of satisfaction we feel when we have gained something “the easy way” all speak to the onto-ethical reality of struggle and effort as the core of the dignity of human action. As an onto-ethical reality, this dignity is not detectable by means of physical analysis and measurement, but it is not a spiritual abstraction either. Life-valuable dignity is the expression in concrete human efforts, in defined social and cultural contexts, of the human drive to overcome the inertia that fear of failure imposes on our drive to realize our life-valuable goals. Technotopian victory in the struggle against the challenge structure of human life would be pyrrhic, for we would lose our humanity in the process of redesign.

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2.3.2 Enhancement, Autonomy, and the Money-Value Driver of Technotopianism David Mitchell’s remarkable novel Cloud Atlas includes the story of a future society that bears unmistakable traces of our own, in which intelligent servants called “fabricants” are genetically engineered and programmed for the convenience and enjoyment of humans who can afford them. One human befriends a servant and – unhappily for him – follows her to witness her fate, the fate of all the fabricants: “As we entered, the celsius dropped sharply and the sound of machines burst our ears. A slaughterhouse production line below us was manned by figures wielding scissors, sword saws, various tools of cutting, stripping, and grinding. Those workers were bloodsoaked … they snipped off collars, stripped clothes, shaved follicles, peeled skin, offcut hands and legs, sliced off meat, spooned organs.”45 Even though they are alive and self-conscious, the fabricants are killed and recycled once they have reached the end of their service life. When queried as to the purpose of this butchery, the narrator responds, “The economics of corpocracy. The genomics industry requires huge quantities of liquefied biomatter … what cheaper way to supply the protein than by recycling fabricants who have reached the end of their working lives?”46 This cost-benefit analysis is hardly fictional: it is the actual driver of global capitalism. Similarly, the story’s fictional killing of those viewed as subhuman mirrors the entire history of human conquest: militarily and economically stronger groups destroying the weaker through expropriation, enslavement, and wholesale slaughter, all justified on the grounds that the weaker and technologically “backward” are morally inferior, without intrinsic life-value, fit only to be worked to death and then replaced. One would have to be inexcusably naive to see Mitchell’s narrative as a distant dystopia, as opposed to a cautionary tale about the looming threat genetic engineering is posing to our own society. Throughout human history, the militarily and economically stronger have reduced the weaker to objects of exploitation and oppression. “Colonisation,” Aimé Césaire wrote, equals “chosification” (thingification, the colonized human being reduced to a thing).47

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The analogy between the history of objectification and destruction of colonized lives and the possible relationships between unenhanced humans and the robotic superintelligences they are trying to create is not lost on the most enthusiastic technotopians. The roboticist Moravec notes that “biological species almost never survive encounters with superior species.”48 In other words, those who cannot afford enhancement can expect to be exterminated, when the enhanced in essence become a new and more powerful cyborg species. We can confirm the likelihood of Moravec’s speciocidal prediction by reference to the genocidal history of colonialism and imperialism. In order to obviate such a fate for humanity, bioethicists George Annas, Laurie Andrews, and Rosario Issi argue that radical genetic enhancements be regarded as a crime against humanity, because of the likelihood that enhanced beings will eliminate their inferior biological ancestors.49 However, unless the idea that biological life is flawed and not worth living in comparison to the virtual life of superintelligences is challenged and overcome, such calls as Annas et al. make are likely to be mocked as “bio-Luddism.”50 Few defenders of enhancement are as candid as Moravec, as most technotopians are keen to defend the liberal pedigree of the project. Despite the likelihood that it would reduce unenhanced humans to the status of Mitchell’s fabricants, technotopians typically argue that egalitarian values will both guide the deployment of enhancement technologies and survive the gradual emergence of enhanced people. They do not attend to the fact that egalitarian values play no actual role in determining policy in the major liberal-capitalist nations, or that inequality has been skyrocketing since the mid-1970s.51 Despite all the evidence against the commitment and capacity of liberal capitalism to distribute any essential life-resource equally, liberal eugenicists and technotopians inexplicably believe that public policy will steer technological development in universally beneficent ways. “On the liberal approach to life-improvement,” Agar writes, “the state would not presume to make any eugenic choices. Rather it would foster the development of a wide range of technologies of enhancement ensuring that prospective parents were fully informed about what kinds of people these technologies would make. Parents’

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particular conceptions of the good life would guide them in their selection of enhancements for their children.”52 However, the main threat is not state-directed eugenics. Any eugenic program undermines the autonomy of the engineered person. As Habermas has recently argued, because the life of a genetically programmed person is not their own, they have been robbed of the freedom to determine their own life that is essential to the value of autonomy in whose name a “liberal eugenicist” like Agar justifies the project of enhancement. Of course, in some sense no one’s life is purely their own, but the engineered person, unlike the person conceived through non-programmed means, has from the beginning been viewed as a set of traits designed to lead to end states assumed to be desirable by the parents and engineers. “Eugenic programming of desirable traits and dispositions gives rise to moral misgivings as soon as it commits the person concerned to a specific life-project, or, in any case, puts specific restrictions on his freedom to choose a life on his own.”53 Proponents of genetic engineering and technological transcendence of the biological typically respond that these fears are overblown, that genetically engineered people will retain the same degree of control over their future as the unenhanced.54 I grant that once genetically engineered people have become self-conscious beings, they can of course exercise some degree of control over their future, as unenhanced people do today. However, Habermas’s deeper point is that, unlike unenhanced human beings, the future products of genetic engineering will have been pre-selected by other people to manifest certain traits, chosen as if from a menu. Engineered people will have been treated as things, not full-fledged human beings who are born into no pre-set future and allowed to become who they want to be. Engineered people will still have the power to change course, but that fact does not change the prior fact, which is the target of Habermas’s critique, that the intention of the parents and engineers was to manufacture a person meeting defined specifications, like a car. Because women’s bodies have been a primary target of technological management, feminists have been at the forefront of the critique of the genetic engineering of embryos. Far from seeing the practice in terms of enhancement of choice, feminists have seen it as

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a grave threat to women’s autonomy. Sylviane Agacinski, for example, argues that biotechnology and its supporters like Savulescu reduce the female body to “a reserve of tissue, cells, and organs, quantifiable and utilizable at will … And the child itself could become a product, at risk of effacing the difference between a person and a thing.”55 In a similar vein, Maria Mies and Veronika BennholdtThomsen object that the genetic engineering industry has targeted women’s bodies as a strategically important site in the struggle to control life. “Reproductive technology,” they argue, “is being expanded all over the globe. It opens the way for eugenic, sexist manipulations of women’s bodies as resources of biological raw material for scientific experiments and bio-industry.”56 Neither care and concern for life in general nor political commitment to the reproductive rights of women entail support for the technotopian project. Selling prospective parents on the dream that their engineered and enhanced offspring will outcompete others in the struggle for maximum money-value accumulation, not women’s liberation, is the goal of the genetic engineering industry. For this reason, the hope that these enhancements might somehow promote equality is as out of touch with socioeconomic reality as the belief that being treated as an object and means of money-value growth promotes autonomy. At present, every “advantage” that parents can provide for their children – education, cosmetic medicine, nutritious food, sports camps, and cultural experiences of all sorts – is distributed unequally, for the sake of ensuring the reproduction of the inequality. The advantaged enjoy more advantages and use them to ensure they accrue even more advantages in the future. Consider the vast inequalities of access to the US university system: “Parents’ income has become an almost perfect predictor of university access. This inequality of access also seems to exist at the top of the educational hierarchy, not only because of the high cost of attending the most prestigious private universities (high even in relation to the income of upper-middle-class parents) but also because admissions decisions clearly depend in significant ways on the parents’ financial capacity to make donations to the universities.”57 Just as the rich use their wealth to more deeply entrench their educational advantages, so they will use their wealth to entrench

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superior power at a genetic level, should such technologies become available for sale. There is simply no evidence available from the actual structure and dynamics of liberal-capitalist society – in which money-value and not principles of equality actually rules – to support the technotopian position. The competitive dynamics of the money-value system deepen the trend towards inequality that will make any sort of democratic society impossible. Capitalism does not depend on one class possessing more money than another, but on one class constantly investing its money to make more money, without regard to life-coherent constraints on what that investment produces. The same “grow or die” drive will replicate itself in genetic arms races amongst the rich, as they seek to confer ever-new “benefits” on their children. If person A confers advantage B on their child C, then E will feel forced by the logic of competitive concern for their child to confer B1 on their child, causing F to seek out B2. The logic of competitive markets, not free choice, motivates the parents here.58 Just as untrammelled competition for money-value appropriation and accumulation has despoiled vast areas of the natural environment, so too will competition for money-value through the sale of enhancement technologies despoil the inner environment of human beings. In both cases, the growth of money-value is fatally misidentified with the growth of life-value. Those few technotopians not dominated in their thinking by the money-value system will rejoin that enhancement technologies can be distributed equally, if we build powerful-enough social struggles. Thus Hughes, the leading social-democratic technotopian, sees enhancement technologies becoming the object of a new democratic movement for public health care in the United States. “In the United States we need to wage a two-pronged struggle, to create an equitable, universal, cost-effective health care system, to ensure that it generously provides all beneficial technologies, including enhancement”59 (emphasis added). Yes, social struggles can influence policy in egalitarian directions, but Hughes’s argument as it stands is not convincing. If we examine the recent history of public healthcare, we find that public provision is more and more limited to “medically necessary” services, the list of which grows shorter as tax policies

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starve health care systems of funds at the same time as an aging population makes more demands on it.60 While determined social movements can reverse the regressive direction of recent changes in tax policies, having more resources available for public health care will not make enhancement technologies any more necessary for human health, leaving them open to private sale to those who can afford them, even in public health systems. The danger that technopianism poses to the liberal value of equality is not lost on all defenders of liberal eugenics. Agar worries that what he calls “radical enhancement” will push inequalities to such an extreme that the liberal values on which he defends “moderate” enhancement cannot survive. “The moral equality that emerges from contemporary contractualism is premised on the idea that humans are roughly equal in terms of their abilities. We enter negotiations offering roughly the same ability to deter ill treatment. If posthumans are much more capable than we are, then they may see less value than we do in a contract that limits what the powerful can do to the weak. The position of humans may be analogous to that of unskilled labourers.”61 His position has the advantage of making clear the way in which existing class power functions as the basis for future genetic inequality. Agar unfortunately does not see the way his liberal premises, and his support for the underlying conception of biological life as flawed and in need of enhancement, pave the way to the radical enhancements he warns against. If one assumes that a) self-maximizing pleasure for each atomic self is the good for that self; b) every individual is free to accumulate the means (money) necessary to purchase the commodities through which those pleasures are produced; and c) people are free to spend the money they have accumulated in those ways they themselves see fit, without constraining regard for the longterm implications of their choices on the natural and social fields of life-support and development, then it follows that d) there is no legitimate limit, from within the horizon of the money-value system that Agar accepts, that could prevent the life-destructive dynamics he fears “radical” enhancement would unleash.

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2.3.3 The Moral Psychology of Human Enhancement: Self-Maximizing Egocentrism However seemingly advanced their technological means of attaining unlimited desire-satisfaction, the technotopians’ understanding of the human good is only a contemporary expression of the egocentrism long-championed by the money-value system. Bentham argued two hundred years ago that “a man’s happiness depends upon such parts of his conduct as affect, immediately at least, the happiness of no one but himself … It cannot but be admitted, that the only interests which a man at all times and upon all occasions is sure to find adequate motives for consulting, are his own.”62 Building on the classic utilitarian edifice, Frances Edgeworth, founder of neo-classical economics, conceived of human beings as “pleasure-machines.”63 The technotopians simply believe they have the scientific means to reconfigure egocentric machines for optimal performance. The defenders of enhancement explicitly expect a market for their products, because of “the inherently insatiable needs and desires of the human consumer.”64 They stimulate these misnamed “needs” by pitching marketing fantasies in which posthumans will enjoy pleasures beyond the power of our existing limited intellect to express. Yet the psychological basis on which this pitch hopes to succeed is the very mundane “desires of the human consumer.” The pitch contradicts itself on an immanent level, directed as it is at finite humans, in order to stimulate consumer demand for technologies that will abolish the biological limits within which their existing desires are formed. This project will thus prove existentially incoherent, since goals such as unlimited health are worth pursuing only for the unreflective, who fear and lament the limitations of their biology. The project would also abolish the structure of desire that capitalist markets depend on. The posthuman consumer would not feel gratified by unlimited experiences and resources that gratify existing human beings. Posthumans would not share the desires of contemporary humans under the social conditions of the ruling money-value system. Life-coherent forms of desire satisfaction demand that human beings reflectively anchor what they want in an understanding of what their lives require, what nature can bear, what existing and future

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people will require, and purposes that contribute to others and the world beyond the ephemeral pleasures of an atomic ego. Reconciling with the limits of our finitude is the only way humans can lead good lives, the only way to preserve our humanity over an open-ended future. Our desires can be stimulated to want endlessly, but achievement of the technotopians’ goals would result in either nothing human left to enjoy or regret over transgression of limits essential to lifeenjoyment. The relevant analogy is the consumer of a new product who soon comes to realize that there is no lasting connection between owning it and a meaningful and worthwhile life. The technotopians exploit the advertising practice of identifying their product with an attractive lifestyle. In the leading academic journal of transhumanism, George Dvorsky argues that transhumanism is “a burgeoning lifestyle choice and cultural phenomenon.”65 This move relies on the neo-classical economic doctrine that objects of choice are value-neutral. Joseph Jackson elaborates: “An adult’s preferences … are not the proper subject matter of moral evaluation. Preferences are morally inert.”66 Preferences in abstraction from action might be morally inert, but then they are not materially real or relevant. The immorality of carrying out a preference to murder cannot begin just with the act, since without the preference, there would have been no act. Only preferences that lead to actions are relevant, and they must be considered in connection with their material implications. One key difference between technotopians and older neo-classical defenders of the limitlessness of consumer desire is that the former know finite material means cannot satisfy infinite desires. Bostrom’s “autopotent superintelligence,” Kurzweil’s “singularity,” and Moravec’s “transcendent mind” all depend upon the abolition of the material body and the material world as constraints on desire-satisfaction. Technotopianism is alive to the classical objection to the possibility of happiness through unrestrained consumption, what the Greeks called pleonexia. Famously, in Book IX of the Republic, Plato claims to prove that the logically necessary outcome of a life spent trying to outdo others in everything is complete isolation and permanent unhappiness and fear.67 If one treats everyone else as an object to be conquered, one can be friend to no one. The person who would be tyrant becomes the most miserable of cowards, afraid of everything and everyone.

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However, if the whole world of things and others could become a programmed function of one’s will in virtual reality, Plato’s paradox could be resolved. Once one is literally everything, there is nothing left to thwart one’s desires. Indeed, the very optimistic technotopian Kurzweil likens the future machine intelligence to the traditional monotheistic god: “In every monotheistic religion God is … described as all of these qualities, only without any limitation: infinite knowledge, infinite intelligence, infinite beauty, infinite creativity, infinite love … of course, even the accelerating growth of evolution never attains an infinite level, but as it explodes exponentially it certainly moves rapidly in that direction. So evolution moves inexorably towards the conception of God, although never quite reaching the ideal. We can regard, therefore, the freeing of our thinking from the severe limitations of its biological form to be an essentially spiritual undertaking.”68 This spiritual undertaking seems like St Paul’s belief that we are “sown in a natural body” but, through the grace of God, rise from the dead in “a spiritual body” no longer subject to material limitations. However, there is an essential difference.69 Love for others – agape, not pleasuremaximization – motivates the Christian journey. Spiritual discipline builds community by enabling us to sublimate our desires so they serve others’ needs. Kurzweil and others aim to make any sort of self or spiritual discipline and love for others unnecessary. Technological evolution driven by competitive market forces will, Kurzweil says, “inexorably” culminate in as close to an approximation of the monotheistic God as possible. Existing liberal society, then, with its values of equality and freedom of choice, and the biological selves who make it up are presented as but instruments of this reified power. The real goal cannot be the maximization of “the amount of intrinsic value as well as happiness in the universe.”70 If there is no life in the universe, there will be no realizable intrinsic value. Intrinsic value may inhere in objects independent of their use by humans, but, as I argued in chapter 1, that value can only be realized by subjects capable of valuing. With no one left to value art, its intrinsic value might remain, but it could not be realized, because there would be no one to recognize it. Likewise, happiness cannot exist without living subjects. The interlocking beliefs that human beings are pleasure machines and that super-machines will experience

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pleasure and be happy rest on a profound onto-ethical confusion between the activities that make life good and the programs machines are designed to execute. An individual fully realizes their life through their core human capacities, in ways that both make the person a definite somebody and widen the choice spaces for other humans, now and in the future. Human affection, care, concern, and love presuppose fragility, vulnerability, and finitude as the ties that bring us together. It would be absurd for us to care about an omnipotent, invulnerable, and unchanging god. Caring is the act of trying to protect another from damage and, positively expressed, to enable them to reach as complete an expression of itself as possible, because it is valuable in its own right and not simply as a tool. As Nel Noddings rightly notes, “Caring is practical, made for this earth.”71 To exchange difficult but real forms of caring human interaction for computer simulations would be to abandon our emotional, social, and political connections. Already in 1981, Henri Lefebvre could see that the essence of technological society was not expanding human freedom but rather programmed control over all experience. “Everyday life managed like an enterprise within an enormous, technocratically administered system – such is the final and last word of the technocratic ethic: every moment anticipated, quantified in money terms, and programmed spatially and temporally.”72 This description applies with precision to every step of the technotopian project, its sales pitch notwithstanding. Let us give the final word of this section to the environmentalist Bill McKibben: “The engineers promise to complete the process of liberation,” he writes, “to free us … from the limitations of dna, just as their predecessors freed us from the confines of the medieval worldview … Whatever you think about the last 500 years, this is one liberation too many. We are snipping the very last weight that holds us to the ground.”73 Our requirements for material nature, connections with other people, and our commitment to an openended future for humanity tie us to the ground – the life-ground of embodied biological being. Liberation of our information-processing capacities from biology will not liberate us as humans but lead to our total objectification as machine functioning.

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2.3.4 The Core Onto-ethical Confusion of the Technotopian Project The project for the transcendence of the biological platform of human life depends upon success in making human nature the object of mastery and control, in extending the logic of technocratic society diagnosed by Lefebvre into the very heart of human material nature. The view that the physical, chemical, and biological laws that govern the vital operations of the body can be understood, reverse engineered, and replicated in artificially intelligent machines connects the more staid defenders of liberal eugenics to the most speculative adventures of the transhumanist movement. Mastery of human nature requires making the most intimate thought processes of human beings the object of scientific research, something of no intrinsic value. As pure object of scientific research, human nature would lose its intrinsic life-value – as an unrepeatable centre of social self-consciousness, action, and relationship – for both individual life-bearers and those who care about them. No matter how complex its simulations, the project to construct human thinking, feeling, caring, intending, striving, and so forth in terms of mere information-processing capacity runs into an insoluble paradox. On the basis of objectively instantiated rules, the project seeks to understand an inner subjective life made possible by those rules, but whose meaning and value for the subjective agent are not reducible to them. The value of our inner lives unfolds against a backdrop of consciousness of our mortality and our need for connection with nature and other people. In missing this, technotopianism commits what McMurtry calls the “externalist fallacy”: “A monolithic but unmarked logical error … What is observable as external phenomena rules out as valid what is internally experienced. The error of this ruling metaphysic proceeds in three steps: (1) what is not externally observable and (2) not measurable by a physical metric, is therefore (3) invalid or superfluous.”74 Neurological and biological systems clearly make human emotions, intelligence, and goals possible, but their role in a good life depends on experience from the “inside,” the developing centre of a person’s identity, regarded as their own and recognized by others for its intrinsic value.

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Let us consider an example. Understanding the mechanics of laughter, no matter at what level of fine-grained detail, does not cause us to laugh. Getting a joke is not the same as recognizing the words, understanding their meaning, or even mimicking the sounds of laughter at the appropriate time. It requires the inner feeling of humour, which in turn presupposes long-standing immersion in the field of human foibles, the soil of all humour. Building a machine that can recognize words and make laughing sounds at the appropriate time does not mean that the machine gets the joke. Humour requires human context. A machine’s simulated laughter sounds would not be gratifying to any comedian. Yet, the entire project of technological transcendence of biology depends upon precise modelling and reengineering all human capacities, on the basis of purely mechanical knowledge of neural circuitry. Kurzweil confidently predicts that “we will learn the principles of operation of human intelligence from reverse engineering all the brain’s regions, and we will apply these principles to brain-capable computing platforms that will exist in the 2020s.”75 He conveniently forgets his own complaint that most of the brain’s functionality is of necessity life-support. However strong an artificial intelligence machine works, it will in no case be a reverse-engineered brain. Proponents of genetic engineering who do not advocate the complete re-engineering of the human being into a machine recognize that the brain supports life. Nevertheless, they share the underlying commitment to a mechanistic ontology: “Intelligence, of many kinds: memory, temperament, patience, empathy, a sense of humour, optimism and just having a sunny temperament can profoundly affect our lives. All of these characteristics will have some biological and psychological basis capable of manipulation with technology.”76 While these characteristics have an underlying physiological basis, the normative inference that their instrumental-technological manipulation is identical to improvement is mistaken. What can be engineered can be made an object of research, but as an object of research the inner subjective life of human beings loses what makes it subjective, its intrinsic meaning to the specific, unrepeatable individual subject acting so as to become a valued contributor to the social and natural worlds to which they self-consciously

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belong. By definition, the scientifically objective is manifest, open to anyone’s gaze, repeatable. The sources of meaning to life-processes, by contrast, do not repeat in any mechanistic way. The whole intensity of life depends upon each individual’s socially self-conscious understanding that their activity means something for others, as well as for themselves. Inner life can of course be shared – through speech, gesture, art, philosophy – but it requires expression within a community that shares and cares about a form of life to be understood. Machines have no inner life, and their networking hardly constitutes a caring community. Machines do not care about themselves, others, or anything else, even if they ostensibly detect care through sensors and simulated language. As Hans Jonas remarked more than half a century ago, “manifestly neither ‘distress’ nor ‘enjoyment’ fit the modus operandi of a machine – not even as an operational analogy, since the machine is equally ‘satisfied’ in each and every step of the behaviour as it occurs, the occurrence as such being its own sole and sufficient vindication.”77 Machines, no matter how powerful, simply execute programmed routines. The technotopian project acknowledges this argument, yet fails to take up its fatal implications for the ultimate goal of instrumentally engineering a superior life-form. Kurzweil defines intelligence as “the ability to solve problems with limited resources,” abstracting from the differences between a computational problem and real-life challenges. Living beings are conscious of problems as threats to survival and development, and we solve problems for the sake of living well and improving living conditions. These goals do not even exist for non-living machines, however fast they might run computations. Kurzweil might rejoin that artificial intelligence will prove “comparable in importance to the advent of biology itself. It will mean that a creation of biology will have mastered its own intelligence and discovered means to overcome its own limitations. Once the principles of operation of human intelligence are understood, expanding its abilities will be conducted by human scientists and engineers.”78 But he clearly commits the externalist fallacy. Human intelligence is not neuroscientific mapping of brain activity, but the realized expression of the organic systems that form the body

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of a being that plans, understands, analyzes, synthesizes, and builds for the sake of the goodness of its life. One cannot separate human intelligence from what it does, which is always anchored in the work of life-protection. Mapping neuronal activity does not indicate that these maps are intelligence. Kurzweil assumes human intelligence will survive removal of the underlying need to work. Surprisingly, he easily moves from the objectifying study of human intelligence in the present to the demand that the entire future of the human species be programmed by scientists and engineers. Externalist fallacy aside, it is self-undermining to equate the abolition of embodied, mortal, social, historical intelligences with a step forward in human history. The project’s success would mark the end of human history. As we saw Moravec note, the superior has always tended to destroy the inferior in cases of conflict between the two. Human life is embodied finite self-activity in community with others and connection with nature; when you engineer out of it the need to connect, to relate, to strive, you just do not have any life left. “Artificial life” is as bald-faced an oxymoron as could be imagined. Speaking to different issues, Hannah Arendt was one of the first to understand the essential significance of natural birth to our human being. With every birth, a genuinely new set of possibilities emerges into the physical order of things. “The fact that man is capable of action means that the unexpected can be expected from him, that he is able to perform what is infinitely improbable. And this again is possible only because each man is unique, so that with each birth something uniquely new comes into the world. With respect to somebody who is unique it can be truly said that nobody was there before.”79 The technotopian trajectory would lead us to forsake the openness of life-possibility that derives from the unformedness of our life-capacities at birth. At that point, as Jonas points out, the complete loss of the existential freedom implied in Arendt’s argument would be lost. Unlike political and social freedom, existential freedom requires the uncertainty of the future from the perspective of the socially selfconscious agent aware of their limited capacities to know and shape

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the unfolding of their life. As Beauvoir argues, “nothing [about a free human life] is decided in advance, and it is because man has something to lose and because he can lose that he can also win.”80 This lack of complete foresight means that we must reflect about the future implications of our present actions. The relative success of our efforts to realize our capacities cannot be programmed into us in advance without destroying the freedom an open future makes possible. Instead, success depends upon the state of the social and natural worlds of our birth, and the degree to which our interactions and relationships with our fellow humans widen the life space and life time available for self-development. New generations of people require their own work, not an instrumental program written by a genetic engineer or computer programmer before they were even born. For the person who is the product of conscious design, “the trial of life has been cheated of its enticing (also frightening) openness; the past has been made to pre-empt the future … [The genetically engineered person] is antecedently robbed of the freedom which only under the protection of ignorance can thrive; and to rob a human-to-be of that freedom deliberately is an inexpiable crime that must not be committed even once.”81 McMurtry’s principle of life-coherence is that materially rational choices, forms of individual and collective activity, public policy, and value systems must “be governed so as to be consistent with human and biodiverse life requirements.”82 Human action becomes lifeincoherent on the natural plane of being alive when it unsustainably consumes scarce resources and overburdens nature’s capacity to act as a sink for wastes. Human action becomes life-incoherent on the social plane when dominated by institutions that enable ruling classes to treat subaltern groups as mere objects to be exploited for the sake of the ruling classes’ private enjoyment and power. Such forms of organization, perhaps stable for hundreds of years, are life-incoherent, because the ruling ideology denies that the people they dominate are all human beings with the same life-requirements and the same general potential for living meaningful and good lives as those who dominate them. Defenders of these oppressive hierarchies claim to serve the good of all members regardless of rank, but manifestly deny to the subaltern the universal requirements of good lives.

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Existential life-incoherence is an extension of the social lifeincoherence of oppressive, alienating, and exploitative ruling value systems and institutions. It results from a misidentification selflimiting choices that enable good lives in conditions of natural scarcity and social interconnection, on the one hand, with deprivations that destroy the goodness of life, on the other hand. The technotopian project’s onto-ethical confusion between free, meaningful, and good lives in community with others and programmed mechanical functioning is a paradigmatic expression of an existentially life-incoherent project. Ironically, perhaps the best support for this conclusion comes from Bostrom’s own speculations about the activities that will occupy the superintelligence he nevertheless wants us to become. Bostrom allows for the possibility that its “desires” will bear no resemblance whatsoever to human desires: We cannot blithely assume that a superintelligence will necessarily share any of the final values stereotypically associated with wisdom and intellectual development in humans … It might be possible through deliberate effort to construct a superintelligence that values such things, or to build one that values human welfare … but it is no less possible – and probably technically easier – to build a superintelligence that places final value on nothing but calculating the decimals of pi … An agent with such a final goal would have a convergent instrumental reason, in many situations, to acquire an unlimited amount of physical resources and, if possible, to eliminate potential threats to itself and its goal system.83 Transhumanist success now looks like computing machines for which human pleasures would have no meaning, and in whose functions humans could recognize nothing of value or meaning. The attempt to escape biology for the sake of lives of unlimited pleasure is quixotic.

chapter 3

Time as Extrinsic Limit and Matrix of Freedom Despite the ultimate incoherence of its proposed solution, technotopianism does emphasize the scarcity of life time. We often regard the temporal limits of our lives as too short for complete fulfillment. In this chapter I will argue that lives can be long enough to be meaningful and good, if they are freed from the social, political, and economic forces that alienate experience and activity. Hence the issue is not, per impossibile, how to attain a mechanical immortality, but to understand and overcome the social causes that make life time an extrinsic limit on life-valuable experience and activity. Time is experienced as free not when it is empty of all demands, but when it is experienced as an open matrix for life-valuable activities. Like the rule of Lesbos, time as an open matrix from life-valuable activities contours itself to the activity and stretches out according to the demands of the experience.1 Human freedom is a form of selfdetermining, self-realizing activity; we experience time as free when we are engaged in life-valuable projects and experiences. When time is experienced as an oppressive burden, by contrast, it feels like an abstract structure imposed upon our life-experience and activity, forcing them to conform to demands that are alien to the activity or the experience themselves. In this chapter I will examine the contemporary structure of unfree time, arguing that it is caused by the dynamics of capitalist market forces and intensified and exacerbated by the ways in which communication technologies have been integrated into everyday life. I will follow Hartmut Rosa’s conception of the contemporary world as a capitalist “acceleration” society. The problem with the acceleration of social life is that it imposes temporal structures that alienate people from themselves, mutualistic relationships and commitment to each other, and the content of their experiences and practical, creative

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activity. Together, these forms of alienation rob life of value and help produce the wish that life could be free of all temporal constraints whatsoever. Freeing time from alienated labour creates the potential for better lives, by making more non-alienated labour and experience possible. It is then up to people themselves to seize the opportunity for life-valuable experience and enjoyment that successful objective struggles against the social causes of alienated time create. Structural changes can create the conditions for the experience of as much life time as possible as free, but only a contemporaneous philosophical struggle with the self can ensure the formation of the desire to use this time for meaningful, non-alienated experiences and activities.2

3.1 Alienation and the Capitalist Acceleration Society Marx was the first to systematically argue that temporal structures themselves could become material factors that oppressively constrict human life-horizons. Capitalist competition is essentially competition over the time it takes to produce commodities: the faster the pace, the higher the productivity of labour, the more potential profit there is to be made.3 While Marx believed that the ever-intensifying pace of production, made possible by technical-scientific progress under competitive market forces, was the historical condition for the ultimate freedom of humanity, his hopes have remained unrealized. Instead, technology has continued to develop in ways he could not have imagined, but these have added to, rather than alleviated, alienation. Hartmut Rosa has advanced Marx’s work on the causes of the alienating experience of time. He defines modernity as a society that accelerates changes in all spheres of social life. In the ever-intensifying swirl of demands on our time, subjects become parcelled out such that their ability to direct their lives according to coherently valuable goals collapses. “The most important finding,” he argues, “on the ramifications of accelerated social change is that high rates of change produce a growing pressure to adapt for both individuals and organizations. This leads to the widespread feeling that one is standing not just on a slippery slope but on terrain that is itself slipping away … as if one were on ‘slipping slopes,’ or a down escalator: in order

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to maintain one’s position … one has to constantly monitor and keep pace with changes in the social environment.”4 The constant need to keep pace with an accelerating reality heightens the experience of alienation, extending it from the capitalist factory to all forms of activity, experience, and relationship. “Multidimensional and high rates of change and instability transform the relationships of human beings to the places in which they live, the material structures that surround them … the people with whom they are in contact, and finally their own feelings and convictions. The faster these things change or are replaced, the less it is worth the effort of becoming intimately familiar with them.”5 Since the value of our lives depends upon becoming “intimately familiar” with our capacities, with the beauty of things and people, with others’ needs and the future of the human project, abandoning the human time of enduring practices and connections for the machine time of money-driven constant change undermines our ability to experience and create life-value. The acceleration society also dissolves the temporal contours of qualitatively distinct times/spaces/experiences into the unceasing, mechanically uniform, 24/7 operations of machines. Machine time is time stripped of all integration with the temporalities of nature, living bodies, and the objects of experience which draw our attention. Machine time, Barbara Adam argues, “is governed by a nontemporal principle of time, a time that tracks and measures motion but is indifferent to change. Abstracted from its material source, this machine time … is created to the good of incessant repetition and perfect repeatability. As such, it is clearly at odds with the rhythms of our body and the natural environment, where variation and the principle of temporality are a source of creativity and evolution.”6 As life time is made to conform to the demands of machine time it must be abstracted from the rhythms of the body and nature. The pace of qualitative changes attached to natural and human processes grounds the possibility of creativity and development and acts as speed breaks on their acceleration. For that reason, the forces of money-capital accumulation target lived time-processes for replacement by machines and machine time. Since embodied life depends upon connections with nature and others, the abstraction of life time from the rhythms

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of the body, the formation of relationships and commitments, and the experience and creative transformation of nature causes harm to these fundamental sources of life-value. 3.1.1 Harms to Health Capitalist acceleration society breaks down the barriers dividing work and social life. The communicative interlinking of selves by electronic devices allows others to reach us at any moment of time. Personal communication devices combined with the intensified pace of economic and cultural changes noted by Rosa means that there are fewer and fewer temporal shelters from the demands of work. The communication revolution intensifies demands on work performance. Judith Wajcman observes that “the dramatic restructuring of workplaces in the face of economic forces and heightened global competition has meant that there is often more work to do, with fewer people to do it. Networked workers’ jobs have also become more complex and demanding as they are required to update their skills to keep up with the latest technology. icts [information and communication technologies] increase the speed and ease with which information can be gathered, processed, analysed, and stored, fostering a higher volume of mediated communications. In combination with a cultural norm of speedy responsiveness, the pace of work quickens.”7 On one level, the intensification of the pace of work is a straightforward continuation of the defining capitalist drive analyzed by Marx to reduce socially necessary labour time. However, whereas for Marx private life was an alienation-free zone (“man the worker only feels himself freely active in his animal functions – eating, drinking, procreating, or at most in his dwelling and dressing up”), communication technologies have broken down even this barrier against the total alienation of life-activity.8 At the extreme, the pace of machine time is inhuman. The interconnection of the globe means that something potentially important is always happening somewhere. The pressure to stay engaged with everything is relentless. “The impossibility of 24/7,” Jonathan Crary argues, “is its impossible temporality … in the incompatibility it lays bare between a human life-world and the evocation of a switched on

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world for which no off-switch exists.”9 In its mildest form, this impossible temporality manifests itself as unsocial impatience and incapacity to attend to others. “24/7 presents the delusion of a time without waiting, of an on-demand instantaneity, of having and getting insulated from the presence of others. The responsibility for other people that proximity entails can now easily be by-passed by the electronic management of one’s daily routines and contacts. Perhaps more importantly, 24/7 has produced an atrophy of the individual patience and deference … the patience to listen to others, to wait one’s turn to speak.”10 At the extreme, individuals who try to live according to this impossible temporality risk death, as the case of a young German intern working for Merrill Lynch in London illustrates. He reportedly died of exhaustion after working for thirty-six straight hours.11 In between impatience and death from exhaustion is everincreasing stress. Wajcman argues that “comprehensive connectivity also heightens expectations of availability and responsiveness, reducing potential downtime and increasing stress.”12 Overscheduled, overconnected, temporally fragmented lives impair bodily and mental health. Stress is not simply a feeling or folk malady but the organic expression of the harmful nature of life in the capitalist acceleration society. Medical research since the 1960s has proven that stress is a measurable physiological state that negatively impacts health. Therefore time pressure is a direct cause of physical impairment when it is a source of stress. As an important study of the effects of stress concludes, “to have consequences for health, experiences rooted in work environments must influence biological mechanisms. The biological systems responsible for homeostatic regulation are the actual pathways of interest in understanding how experiences arising from the social ordering of society lead to socioeconomic gradients in morbidity and mortality.”13 From the biological point of view, life is a struggle to maintain homeostasis. Homeostasis is a complex equilibrium established within and between the body’s basic organic systems, but our ability to maintain it depends upon the social environment within which we live just as much as on endogenous biological systems and processes. Physiological health requires that organic inputs, outputs,

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and tempi of operation and interaction between systems be maintained within certain defined ranges, and all of those factors are functions of social organization. Biochemically, stress registers as increased levels of epinephrine (adrenalin) in the bloodstream. Rising epinephrine levels increase blood pressure, heart rate, and blood sugar levels. Chronically high blood sugar levels (as in diabetes) can damage blood vessels. In dangerous environments, short-term stress can be life-protective. When the body must flee, the physiological effects of adrenalin provide the extra energy the body needs to escape a life-threatening situation. As a chronic condition imposed not by short-term dangers but the regular pace of money-value-driven social life, chronic stress increases morbidity and mortality rates because of the damage it causes to the cardiovascular system. This fact has increasingly been recognized by health professionals. For example, one of Britain’s leading doctors has argued in favour of a four-day work week (without loss of pay) on the basis that it will reduce stress and improve overall health, especially for the working class.14 Even when people claim to enjoy the intensity of life in a 24/7 connected environment, the stress it causes is undoing their bodies from within. Whether the pace of life is experienced as oppressive or not, the time structures of accelerated capitalism gradually harm the body at a cellular level. The experience of time as free is thus not a luxury, but a fundamental life-requirement directly related to the maintenance of health. Without using the term, Sterling and Eyer understand this life-value of free time: When the environmental demands are identified, predicted and demonstrably met, that is, when coping has been successful, arousal must be followed by a period of relaxation. This allows anabolic (that is, the cellular synthesis/rebuilding of organic molecules, growth and repair) hormones to flow, restoring blood pressure, energy stores, the immune system, gut lining … it also allows restoration of a relaxed subjective state so that intimate social relations and spiritual ties can be restored that tend to be disrupted by the agonistic moods and behaviour accompanying arousal. In this context, it must be appreciated

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that essentially all the catabolic (that is, the cellular breakdown of organic molecules and energy production) hormones, including epinephrine, cortisol, acth, thyroxine, trh, and the opiates, in addition to their metabolic effects, tend to elevate mood, suppress fatigue and pain … [F]rom this point of view one might consider the Sabbath as a cultural adaptation to ensure regular periods of physiological, interpersonal, and spiritual anabolism. Its progressive corruption in modern society reflects the continued unrestricted expansion of arousing activities and the loss of a potentially important source of anabolic time.15 Sterling and Eyer do not equate rests and relaxation with doing nothing, but with freedom from alienating work demands that enable us to devote time to “restoring social and spiritual ties.” They thus imply the essence of the experience of time as free: a feeling of openness to the uncoerced development and fulfillment of experience and activity. In this temporal matrix experience, activity, and relationships are restorative, because they unfold at a pace determined by the activities themselves. 3.1.2 Harms to Relationships and Commitments Social harm to the health of our bodies is the most fundamental form of harm. Since our core human capacities are made possible by our embodied being, societies that systematically damage our bodies and their systems impede the full realization of life-value. However, although our core human capacities are rooted in our bodies, they are not simply private concerns, but the means through which we contribute to others’ good too. The realization of our core capacities forges relationships to others. The social health of these relationships demands commitment on the part of their members. Capitalist acceleration society alienates us from other people even as it claims to expand our social connections. Alienation from other people thus causes harm to our ability to forge meaningful relationships and commitments to other people.

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Here again the social cause of the problem is changes in the temporal organization of the culture of work. The decline of stable, fulltime employment and the concomitant shift towards part-time and contract work is the first manifestation of this cause. Capitalists promote this change as in the interest of workers, offering “flexible” work hours, but the reality is the opposite of the ideology, as Richard Sennett’s The Corrosion of Character first described. Sennett’s critique of the new time-regimes of late twentieth-century capitalism exposed the deleterious consequences of the loss of job security for the character of workers. “It is the time-dimension of the new capitalism … which most directly affects people’s emotional lives outside the workplace. Transposed to the family realm, ‘No long term’ means keep moving, don’t commit yourself, and don’t sacrifice.”16 The temptation is to dismiss Sennett as an anachronistic family-values conservative who wants to protect the sanctity of hearth and home from the depraved outside world. That reading would be wrong. “Family realm” should not be narrowly construed as a 1950s cliché. Sennnet uses the term more inclusively to refer to those spheres of social life in which people try to forge and maintain mutually affirmative relationships. Sennett is primarily worried about the deleterious consequences to enduring relationships of all sorts. Marriage, for example, requires long-term commitment, but so too do decisions about where to live, what talents to try to develop, what friends to try to make, whether to buy a house or not. Moreover, political struggles also have a long-term temporal character. If people cannot commit themselves to anything over the long term because they think of their lifetimes in short, fragmented units, the ability to commit to long-term political projects can be compromised just as easily as long-term relationships. The point is, social critics should not dogmatically reject as conservative Sennett’s focus on character. Pervasive social problems like racism and sexism are not defeated by short campaigns but require lifetimes of struggle. People who think that the only commitments possible to take on are short-term commitments are unlikely to devote themselves to open-ended political struggles. The ethical strength to commit oneself to the creation and improvement of the enduring conditions of good lives for each and all,

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now and over the open-ended future, is the life-value of character. Commitment to this human project requires strength of character because it demands the subordination of narrow, capitalist-induced self-interest to the expression of life-capacities that make a real contribution to the human project over the long term. Loss of that strength of character means loss of care and concern about the general conditions of human life, and loss of care about and concern with the general conditions of human life entails the decline of social movements that depend upon solidarity. In place of the strength to forge long-term commitments of personal and political sorts arises what Sennett calls a “demeaning superficiality” caused by the “disorganization” of time. “Time’s arrow is broken; it has no trajectory in a continually re-engineered … shortterm political economy. People feel the lack of sustained human relations and durable purposes.”17 In undermining people’s life-security, flexibilization has not freed life time from the coercive domination of money-value, but intensified it. As Rosa noted, the acceleration society forces people to stay current and re-invent themselves in mechanical response to the latest business fashions. Instead of building a substantive character and forging relationships on this basis, marketability becomes the primary concern. People are forced to abandon or suppress their defining commitments by the extrinsic power that labour markets exert on their character. The acceleration society thus weakens social commitments to each other at the same time as it intensifies dependence on everchanging labour markets. The social costs of austerity have been much discussed; the psychological and ethical costs to individuals less so. As people are cut off from defunded public institutions and fall through the holes in the safety nets past generations of workingclass struggle created, they must compromise their character and commitments so that they can find jobs. The older must try to appear youthful, the uninterested, interested, the bored, enthusiastic. Our real dependence on each other is decried as bondage; our social dependence on reified market forces extolled as freedom. “The social bond arises most elementally from a sense of dependence. All the shibboleths of the new order treat dependence as a shameful condi-

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tion: the attack on rigid bureaucratic hierarchy is meant to free people structurally from dependence; risk taking is meant to stimulate self-assertion rather than submission to what is given … None of these representations of dependence as shameful, however, promotes strong bonds of sharing.”18 The social infrastructure of collective life-capital built up over centuries of non-alienated labour to satisfy shared life-requirements is destroyed in the name of “independence,” when the clear result is growing dependence on labour markets and those who control them. The value of character as the product of a life’s work is lost and the self is reduced to an ever-more-quickly reprogrammable function of labour-market fashions. Defenders of flexibilization will no doubt respond that contemporary labour markets are a response to, rather than an imposition upon, the demands of workers. As opposed to the rigid temporal logic of “nine to five” or the body-destroying alternations imposed by shift work in old factories, contemporary capitalism respects and encourages “work-life balance.” If flexibilization really were about adapting work to life, it would be a life-valuable development. However, the real goal of flexibilization is to increase the productivity of labour. Arlie Russell Hochschild was one of the first to understand this truth. Her study of a purportedly progressive corporation revealed that the new time regime was even more coercive than the stereotypical “nine to five.” This company’s “Work-Life Balance program could have become a model … but that did not happen. The question I have asked is: Why not? The answer, we have seen, is complex. Some working parents … were disinclined to work shorter hours because they needed the money or feared losing their jobs … in some companies workers may also fear that ‘good’ shorter hours jobs could at any moment be converted into bad ones, stripped of benefits or job security. Even when such worries were absent, pressure from peers or supervisors to be a ‘serious player’ could cancel out any desire to cut back on work hours.”19 So long as human life remains socially dependent upon money, and access to money remains tied, for most, to paid employment, and paid employment is made available only when it is profitable for employers to do so, work time

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will be organized in the interests of the owners of money-capital, and remain (for the overwhelming majority of workers) a coercive power over their lives. Workers today, especially women workers, find themselves in a never-ending scramble to assemble and reassemble their daily lives as best they can to ensure that every demand of work and family is satisfied. Hochschild elaborates: “The politics of time has become almost totally personalized in recent decades. A giant public issue appears to us as millions of individual problems, each to be solved at home. Companies have far more power over families than families have over companies … So time demands at work come to seem implacable while those at home come to seem malleable. Workers focus on that aspect of the whole that they feel they can control – continually organizing and re-organizing odd fragments of increasingly fractured domestic time.”20 Again, the overall consequence is loss of life-coherence – the experience of time as an open matrix of possibilities for non-alienated work is negated in favour of the fragmented time of responding and reacting. Even when the job itself might be non-alienated (like caring for one’s own children), the social impossibility of attending to it at the pace the job itself requires adds to the overall alienation of people from their life time. Life time is forced once again into the structures of machine time and quality reduced to quantitative efficiency: complete the first task that needs to be completed so that attention can shift to the next task, over and over, with no sense of unified purpose or meaning: “Domestic life has become quite literally a second shift; a cult of efficiency once centred on the workplace is allowed to set up shop and make itself comfortable at home. Efficiency has become both a means and an end … A surprising amount of family life has become a matter of efficiently assembling people into prefabricated activity slots.”21 If the objection is again raised that the problem here is not time but traditional family life, I would rejoin that single people, same-sex couples who have decided not to have children, and heterosexuals living in freely negotiated, open relationships might escape some added time-pressures imposed by traditional family structures, but not the more general temporal pressures exerted by accelerated capitalism.

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More technological points of contact between selves, combined with the same social pressures to find paid work, combined with the structural changes towards temporary and precarious labour mean that almost no one can escape the socioeconomic forces fragmenting the meaningful whole of life time into meaningless segments. “We live in a society in which the standard working week, when work was synchronised for a substantial portion of the population, is no longer the norm. Flexible working hours, 24/7 working time, and contract work create coordination problems, as working time and location are increasingly deregulated and scattered. The growth of non-standard evening and weekend hours is also associated with increased time pressure, in part because they decrease individuals’ ability to mesh work schedules with the social activities of friends and family as well as to find adequate time to sleep.”22 As the links between people grow, the demands on our time intensify beyond the point where it is possible to accommodate them all in a single day with the given and limited capacities of the human body. Social pressure to keep up with the pace of the treadmill generally means that rather than reduce the demands on their time, people try to find new ways to subdivide activities and experiences. As a result, people’s ability to be present for each other even when they are in the same room is compromised. “The price to be paid” for comprehensive connectivity, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht observes, “is that our ideas, our imaginations, and our daydreams are each time less where we are with our bodies. You see people meeting for dinner at gorgeous places on a Friday night, only to be lured away by a ringing cell phone … and when they arrive at the meeting that they are coordinating their minds will again be ahead of their bodies. Together with the contours of events and the existential contrasts between presence and absence, private and public, we may also lose … a sense for what matters and what does not.”23 Here again, even though the deep driver of this fragmentation is the competitive dynamics of capitalism, there is a difference between this socio-cultural dimension of alienation and Marx’s understanding. For Marx, the alienation of workers from each other referred to the fragmentation of their experience of their own labour, with the result that each saw the other worker as nothing but an actual or possible competitor for scarce

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work. The underlying bonds of cooperation that made the working class as a whole the creators of the built social environment were blocked from view.24 This form of alienation between people persists, of course, but has added to it alienation from the value of embodied co-presence in shared material space. As it becomes more and more difficult to arrange fragmented daily and weekly schedules, people substitute virtual for physical contact or engage in virtual contact while they are physically present to others. While virtual contact is good as a supplement to co-presence in physical space, as a substitute it robs human social interaction of the spontaneity, the multisensorial richness, and intensity of material interaction in shared space. When it intrudes into shared space it separates, as Gumbrecht noted, mind and body. One’s attention is never focused on the same location where one’s body is, even though embodiment remains essential to human life-value. The superiority of embodied sexual relationships to the virtual alternative is only the most obvious proof of this claim. 3.1.3 Harm to Experience and Creative Activity The technological fragmentation of life time thus compromises not only our relationships and commitments to other people but, even more pervasively, the ability to sustain attention on what is materially present. Since the specificity of things is discovered through sustained attention to that which is materially present, and learning about the specificity of things is essential to becoming a specific and unique person with something worth sharing with others, loss of engagement with the present moment harms the value of our individuality. Gumbrecht’s analysis is again illuminating: “The dynamics of globalization are no longer in synchrony with very basic human needs and human limits. We want to recuperate the body as a core dimension of individual existence; we want to claim specific places, specific regions, and the planet Earth as spheres of ‘home’ to which we belong … we are longing for languages that open up and are shaped by the specific spaces that we call ours.”25 In order to be someone one must be from someplace and understand its contours as a local. Edward S. Casey, in a discussion of the

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importance of situatedness for identity-formation, puts this point very well: “The body not only goes out to reach places; it also bears the traces of the places it has known. These traces are continually laid down in the body, sedimenting themselves there … A body is shaped by the places it has come to know and that have come to it – come to take up residence in it by a special kind of placial incorporation that is just as crucial to the human self as is the interpersonal incorporation.”26 The same understanding of the connection between the value of embodiment and the materiality of places underlies Paul Virilio’s argument that the utopia (no-place) of virtual presence is “a sham … unliveable. We have gone from Twilight of the Idols to Twilight of the Places. This is not a play on words. We are of and in the world. We are no pure spirit. In this sense, I am a materialist and a phenomenologist. The fear … is that something essential is being lost, a relationship to places and reality is disappearing, dissolving, evaporating.”27 Material presence and co-presence are conditions for the full development of our senses, intellect, and creative capacities. Of course, the supreme importance to human identity formation of the local grounding and contouring of life does not entail parochialism: the earth is the totality of particular places that bodies can potentially be and move around within. But nobody can be everywhere and everybody is from somewhere. The illusion that the mind can virtually escape the body’s boundedness to time and place and be omnipresent undermines the poetics of close attention to the materially present at the same time as the work of individuation is compromised. While this problem is ultimately social, it is overwhelmingly approached as a problem of individual adaptation to the “real world.” Instead of organizing to change the temporal dynamics of accelerated capitalism, individuals try to cope on their own by packing more and more into their schedules. No matter how fine-grained the temporal division of the schedule, there is never enough time to do all that one has planned to do. The result is the well-known practice of “multitasking,” in which an overstretched and overburdened person tries to perform a number of distinct tasks at the same time. Multitasking is the most obvious form of alienation between the self and its own experience and creative activity. When one multitasks, one is alienated from the activities one is trying to perform, whether or

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not these activities are part of one’s paid employment. The alienation consists in the fact that the multitasking self regards all of the activities in which it is engaged as simply imposed burdens that must be taken care of, rather than meaningful accomplishments. These tasks are not forms of purposive self-objectification but demands that lack intrinsically meaningful content and simply must be completed. The sign of the alienation is the poor quality of the work actually accomplished. “Several studies indicate,” Wajcman notes, “that multitasking may actually impair performance. Ironically, ‘heavy’ media multitaskers are more susceptible to distractions and perform worse on cognitive tasks than ‘light’ multitaskers. So increasing one’s amount of ict-based multitasking does not improve ability to master it. In general, the literature on multitasking points to negative outcomes: reduced cognition or performance (even among ‘digital natives’) or rising work-related strain. Psychologists confirm that humans are incapable of giving their full attention to two tasks simultaneously.”28 Learning and doing by definition require attention – the more attention is distracted and divided, the less learning and the less successful doing there is going to be. The implications for life-value are clear, if ironic: the more we try to pack into life under pressure of moneyvalue-driven networks, the less meaningful life we actually live (and remember having lived – one of the consequences of not paying attention, as anyone can confirm, is that we cannot recall the events or activities to which we did not give our full attention). The reports that Wajcman cites have been confirmed by the neuroscientist Daniel Levitin. Levitin reveals that the human incapacity to multitask is not just a historical artifact of human education, but lies deeper in our neural architecture. “The processing capacity of the conscious mind has been estimated at 120 bits per second. That bandwidth, or window, is the speed limit for the traffic of information we can pay attention to at any one time … With such attentional restrictions, it’s clear why many of us feel overwhelmed … Part of the reason is that our brains evolved to help us deal with life during the hunter-gatherer phase of human history, a time when we might encounter no more than a thousand people across the entire span of our lifetime.”29 While the organization of the brain is plastic and its networks are formed in interaction with experience, it cannot be

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“wired” any way one likes. There is a dialectical relationship between experience and brain development, but individuals cannot subjectively will themselves to do what the underlying, basic architecture of the brain rules out. Levitin is not reducing human beings to basic brain architecture, but arguing that basic brain architecture sets a limit to what it is possible to do. But beyond the material impossibility of multitasking well is the more important implication for life-value. Multitasking crams more distinct activities into a given moment, but in response to extrinsic social and economic demands. Since we feel no intrinsic value in the activities forced upon us, we do not pay attention to what we are doing when we multitask, and therefore derive little life-value from it. These activities do not define us. However, if most of what we do every day is in response to these demands, large segments of life become pointless routine, and opportunities for meaningful selfactivity are irretrievably lost. The other side of the critique of multitasking is the life-value of close attention. The brain functions best when it is allowed to pay attention to the task at hand because “attention is the most vital resource for any organism.”30 The objects, people, or experiences that capture people’s attention exert claims on people’s time. The more time we can devote to paying attention to that which is life-valuable in these experiences and relationships, the more meaningful our lives become. Although he does not use the term “life-value,” Levitin’s work substantiates this claim. “It takes more energy to shift your attention from task to task. It takes less energy to focus. That means that people who organize their time in a way that allows them to focus are not only going to get more done, but they’ll be less tired and less neurochemically depleted after doing it.”31 Attention is essential to memory formation, and memory formation is crucial to identity formation. We are most shaped by those experiences we remember most, and those experiences we remember most are those to which we pay most attention. If we are paying most attention to experiences and activities that are life-valuable, we will form our identity around life-valuable memories, and make of our lives the best ethical wholes that we can make them to be. Levitin notes that there is a “well-established principle in cognitive psychology called levels

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processing. Items that are processed at a deeper level, with more active involvement by us, tend to become more strongly encoded in memory.”32 Other things being equal, the more attention we pay to life-valuable experiences and activities, the more life-value we can produce in our lives. The acceleration society is at war with the capacity to concentrate on projects and actualize their potential life-value. Instead it teaches people, from quite a young age, how to constantly relinquish attention in response to commands from an extrinsic authority. In illustration of this claim consider a “game” described by Michael Sandel that was popular in the first decade of the twenty-first century with parents who were trying to manufacture high-achieving children. Its purpose was to condition children to perform well on the entrance exams that snobbish preschools now administer. The game forced children to try to complete an assigned task before a mechanical sound signalled that it was time to switch to a new activity.33 Rather than allowing children to take as much time as they needed to solve the problem – the absolute right of the child as learner – they were taught that the clock rules human activity and everyone must conform their behaviour to its demands. A critic might object that I am overlooking the importance of quantitative increase of possibilities for connection and action that life in the capitalist acceleration society open up. As evidence, they might point to people’s subjective feelings, which I myself noted (in response to Benatar in chapter 1) must be taken into account in any evaluation of the value of life. Not everyone feels imposed upon and dominated by the networks that dominate capitalist acceleration society. Many people embrace the possibilities for communication, playful reconstruction and dissemination of self-identity, and flexible scheduling that mobile connective devices allow. In contrast to the “company man” of the 1950s – uniform in style of dress, rigid in commitment to a narrow set of repressive community values, absolutely loyal to the company for which he expected to work his entire life, content in segmented spheres of life each with their allotted portion of time – the acceleration society might be a liberation. Indeed, many of the leading developers of information technology were active members of the 1960s counterculture and developed their business models in critical

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response to the vertical hierarchies of the Fordist model of production and management.34 Everyone the stereotypical company man feared – the non-conformist, the sexualized youth, the politicized black man, the liberated woman, the gay man – has escaped the closet and broadcast their ideas and identity to the world. The dynamics of capitalism have in fact, the critic might say, democratized the personal communication technologies that allow people to maintain friendships across vast distances, to play at being other people in online virtual spaces, to work from home – in sum, to do what they want to do when they want to do it. If the communication technologies that define the latest phase of the acceleration society help to free time from the rigid block scheduling of the past, letting the worker work when it is best for her and to play when the mood strikes her, if it creates virtual spaces for playing with identity and for inventing new forms of artistic and political expression and connection, then maybe my objections are anachronistic. As Robert Hassan argues, Networked time is not necessarily an extension of clock time into every domain of life, but rather an alternative to it that frees us for the experience of new temporalities and relationships: the numberless asynchronous spaces of the networked society, created and inhabited by people … in interaction, undermine and displace the time of the clock. What we experience, albeit in very nascent form, is the recapture of the forms of temporality that were themselves displaced by the clock. What digital networks make possible is the conscious creation of temporal contexts and the freeing of the embedded times in humans, in nature, and in society that form the timescapes that intersect our lives but that we have been unable to fully experience, appreciate, or understand, because of the deadening implacability of clock time.35 Hassan is correct insofar as he highlights the novel possibilities for interaction and self-direction of time that new communication technologies open up, but misses the deeper point. The rule of clock time per se is not the cause of alienation, but the acceleration of social life

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to velocities incompatible with life-valuable experience and activity. I am not opposed to online play or virtuality as such, but to the fragmentation of the self and its parcelling into too many inadequately elaborated experiences. We may indeed feel ourselves free while playing, but the social forces that have invented the technologies deploy it not to liberate us but to enmesh more life-activity in commercial circuits. It does not follow, of course, that people are dominated in each and every particular act they undertake, in either real or virtual life. It does follow, on the other hand, that social and economic power remains the driver of the deployment of the technologies, whether or not the end-user is consciously aware of this power at any particular moment. To be sure, social networks allow for new forms of interaction and creative expression, but if these possibilities are to be realized, network temporality must itself be slowed to the pace that self-cultivation and life-valuable creation require. All technological developments create fields of possibilities which must be evaluated according to their potential life-value. The problem with Hassan’s objection is that it underestimates the extent to which machine time actually rules over networked experience. It does not follow from this claim that virtual interactions have no life-value. Rather, my contention is that the dominant forms of online experience and interaction alienate us further from nature, society, and lifevaluable creative labour, not only because of the commercial forces that own them, but also because of the way they tend to fragment time and activity into ever-smaller units. Trying to always do more means less time for any particular action, with the result that insufficient attention and concentration are given to any one moment in particular, thinning to the point of superficiality every digitized experience and activity and thus reducing their life-value. Yet, even if it is true that the fragmentation of experience leads to the thinning of each particular experience, might it not be the case that for mortals, maximizing thin experiences is superior to long-lasting commitments to a few thick ones? Camus articulates the underlying idea of this objection with appropriate existential seriousness and depth: “What does life mean in such a universe? Nothing else for the moment but indifference to the future and a desire to use up everything that is given … If I convince myself that life has no other aspect

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than that of the absurd … if I admit that my freedom has no meaning except in relation to its limited fate, then I must say that what counts is not the best living, but the most.”36 I agree that maximizing life-experiences is one side of a valuable life. Yet, there is more value to maximizing the number of thick experiences one has to the sheer maximization of the total number of experiences as such, without regard to what one “gets” out of them. Good lives, to the extent that they involve the development of a particular self that not only has but grows from experiences, must allow for the savouring of some experiences over others, reflection upon some and not others, and time frames shaped not by a mad rush to do as much as possible without paying attention to anything, but by the demands that fulfillment, learning, growth, and deep enjoyment require. Good lives are not simply “filled” with experience, but demand socially self-conscious effort to find or produce meaning. Likewise, the harm of being deprived of some experiences is not absolute. We are not harmed just because we cannot do everything it is conceivable to do, but only when what we do is accelerated to timescales that preclude doing them properly, or our lives are fragmented into micro-experiences between which we must constantly switch, upping stress loads and destroying the capacity for close attention. Camus comes close to recognizing my perspective in a footnote where he states that he does not mean by “the most living” nothing but accumulation of particular experiences no matter what their content. “Quantity sometimes constitutes quality,” which implies that the absurd person should seek out as many different types of experience that can be lived fully as possible, according to the time it takes to consummate and fulfill them.37 The best life produces the most meaning and life-value, and the most meaning is produced through forms of non-alienated experience and activity that unfold according to immanent temporal dynamics integrated with the unfolding of the experience or activity itself. Expanding the extent of life time experienced as free requires struggle: not against our mortality, as the technotopians argue, but against the causes of the temporal dimensions of alienation from ourselves, our responsibilities, commitments, experiences, and activities.

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3.2 Process Time and the Creation of Life-Value “All politics,” Peter Osborne argues, “continually [involve] struggles over the experience of time. How do the practices in which we engage structure and produce, enable or distort, different senses of time and possibility? What kinds of experiences of history do they make possible or impede? Whose futures do they ensure? … Think, in particular, about the problems posed for a politics of emancipation by a horizon of expectation within which the replacement of capitalism within any current lifetime is longer a feasible prospect.”38 Since time is the matrix within which everyone’s life plays out, no oppressed group or individual can ignore the politics of time. Embodied finitude is our shared human condition, and the imperative it places upon living well now, within the arc described by our birth and ultimate death, is felt by anyone regardless of the concrete differences and specific history that defines them. Lenin’s question, “What is to be done?,” takes on a deeper significance when it is posed by people attuned to their mortality. It means not only “what sorts of structural changes do we need to make collectively in order to ensure that fundamental life-requirements are met for each and all,” but also “what do I, this centre of socially self-conscious experience and activity, do now, to make this life enjoyable, meaningful, valued, and valuable?” As Immanuel Wallerstein, speaking in 2010 at the United States Social Forum, put this point: “People live in the present. Everybody has to eat today … Everybody has to sleep today. Everybody has to do all these ordinary things today, and you can’t tell people that they just have to wait another five or ten or twenty years, and it’s going to get better somehow.”39 As with fundamental physical needs, every one of our experiences and activities should contribute to meeting our overarching need to make our lives meaningful ethical wholes. Every moment of our life time ought to be meaningful, or the occasion for a struggle against whatever structural impediment stands in the way. There are thus two sides to the politics of time, the objectivestructural and the subjective-ethical. The objective-structural moment is bound up with the struggle of the working class against the unfree, reified structure of time and the life-destructive pace of work in cap-

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italist industry.40 The best starting point for understanding the contemporary content of the politics of time is Juliet Schor’s now famous The Overworked American. Schor argued that the American labour movement needed to reorganize itself around a politics of time. Noting that American unions had abandoned the fight for shorter working weeks in the 1960s, Schor went on to argue that they had given up the most radical demand that unions can make: that their members’ lives be free from as much alienated work as possible. Instead, American unions in the postwar period chose deeper integration with capitalism, acceding to capital’s demand for higher productivity in return for higher wages. “The end of shorter hours was due partially to workers’ preferences for money over free time. The immediate postwar years witnessed a surge of pent up consumer demand. The long boom and the spread of home ownership encouraged the acquisition of consumer goods. Workers wanted more … the nation became locked into a cycle of work and spend. Leisure was left out of the loop.”41 Schor defines “leisure” as the residual time available for discretionary use once hours of work (both paid and unpaid domestic labour) have been subtracted.42 A consumer boom following the deprivations of war was understandable, Schor maintains, but the “work and spend” cycle is no longer linked to any justifying historical conditions but is an increasingly irrational addiction. In Schor’s analysis, Marx’s “historic mission” of capitalism to increase the productivity of labour to the point where basic liferequirements can be satisfied with ease had been achieved by the 1960s. Americans kept working to fuel a consumer lifestyle that was as ethically empty as it was environmentally destructive, while millions of other Americans languished unemployed. Both problems could be solved, Schor contended, by shortening the work week and re-dividing social labour time. When we add up all the items we consume, and consider the overall impact, rather than each in isolation … the more ambiguous are the effects of commodities … In an era when the connections between perpetual growth and environmental deterioration are becoming more apparent, with the quality of public life declining in many areas … shouldn’t we at least step

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back and re-examine our commitment to ever-greater quantities of consumer goods? … Once we take the broader view, can we still be so sure that all these things are really making us better off? We do know that the increasing consumption of the last forty years has not made us happier.43 Beyond secure access to the fundamental requirements of life-maintenance, happiness requires meaningful relationships and activities, and very few jobs, Schor maintains, provide opportunities for meaningful relationships and activity. A renewed politics of time, therefore, ought to focus on reducing working time in favour of increased leisure time, for it is when we are at leisure that we are able to create our own happiness. In recent years her demands for a shorter work week in favour of more hours of leisure have been repeated and amplified by Marxists and environmentalists. In Europe, André Gorz long defended a position similar to Schor’s, although for Gorz the project of societywide reductions in labour time is defended as a means of making the radical left once again relevant.44 Others advancing a similar line of argument include Stanley Aronowitz and Jonathan Cutler, Peter Victor, Nichole Marie Shippen, and Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams. All have identified an increase in the leisure-to-work ratio as crucial to solving not only the unemployment crisis, but the ecological crisis as well. Sam Gindin and Michael Hurley have called upon the Canadian labour movement to renew the struggle for a shorter work week as a key element in making unions relevant again as fighting organizations whose primary role is to help overcome alienated labour by freeing workers as far as possible from the coercive structures of capitalist work. Appropriating labour time as free time will help solve the environmental crisis (by reducing demand on scarce resource stocks along with waste), the economic crisis of chronic unemployment (which, even when official rates are low, leaves millions of people needlessly out of paid employment), and the existential crisis of life time irredeemably wasted in meaningless work and spend routines.45 What Schor calls “plenitude” defines the shared goal of the objective-structural politics of time: “The bottom line is that room to manoeuvre is narrowing. In the bau [business as usual] economy,

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we’re faced with a choice between stagnation and low prices, or growth with high costs and mounting damages. The plenitude path transcends this dilemma. It’s parsimonious in the use of scarce natural resources and a heavy user of what can be comparatively in surplus – time, knowledge, technology, and, as we reconstruct it, community.”46 All agree that the change is radical and incompatible with the normal dynamics of capitalist markets. Victor has developed publicly accessible computer simulations that model different mixes of labour time, income, and standards of living, giving concrete content to potential objectives of social movements struggling against the given distribution of labour time.47 While the implications of the objective-structural politics of time can be realized gradually, its final success would involve the institutionalization of four key changes: 1) the transformation of private and exclusive control over universally required life-resources to collective stewardship and democratic management and use in the longterm life-interests that unify individuals engaged in the open-ended human project; 2) allowing public debate and democratic deliberation rather than market forces to determine the best means of using these resources to comprehensively satisfy the life-requirements of each and all; 3) fully enabling the free expression and enjoyment of core human capacities; 4) in ways which contribute to and are sustainable over the open-ended future of the human project. So long as condition 1 is not satisfied, conditions 2–4 cannot be fully satisfied. However, each can be partially realized in ways that make existing society better or worse. In other words, overthrowing capitalism once and for all is not a political sine qua non for realizing these goals.48 The social power of the ruling, money-appropriating class over everyone else is grounded in its control over the resources all require to live. As long as life-resources are controlled by a minority class, workers’ life time will be shaped by the pressure to conform life-experience and activity to those forms most likely to help one find the paid employment one will need in order to survive. Within this structure, struggles to reduce labour time for the sake of increased leisure will not create the conditions in which life time will be experienced as free, but only more empty time which is in danger of being recaptured by alienating leisure industries.49

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The architects of the objective-structural politics of time are sensitive to the problem of recapture of time released from paid work by leisure industries. Shippen in particular provides a nuanced historical analysis of the way in which capitalism reconfigured itself in order to ensure that time freed from alienated activity in labour markets would be recaptured by capital in newly evolving consumer markets: “The colonization of time entailed a systematic reorganization and reconceptualization of leisure by business in the early twentieth century that resulted in the reconstruction of the social understanding of time to better fit the needs and logic of the accumulation process, including the debasement of the classical or humanist rendition of leisure to the modern notion of free time for consumption.”50 Shippen turns to Aristotle for an alternative account of leisure. For Aristotle, work is for the sake of satisfying life-necessities, the satisfying of life-necessities for the sake of leisure, and leisure for the sake of developing that which is highest and best in us.51 Shippen does not follow Aristotle in his understanding of intellect alone as that which is highest and best (in fact, she does not address this issue in any systematic way), but the important point here is the distinction between leisure as time outside paid employment in which to spend its proceeds, and leisure as time for free self-development and cultivation. My critique of machine-time under accelerated capitalism shares with the objective-structural politics of time a commitment to the re-division of labour time and a reduction in the standard hours of paid employment in alienating work environments. Success in these struggles will free definite quantities of time from alienated routine and thus create the potential for its re-appropriation and use in nonalienated forms of experience and activity. However, I do not agree with many in this movement that work and leisure should be contrasted as free and unfree activities. On the contrary, the meaning of human life is largely a function of different forms of non-alienated work, which means that work and the experience of time as free are not antitheses, as Srnicek and Williams, for example, argue.52 Moreover, leisure time can itself be alienating, and there is no reason to believe that objective structural changes without concomitant philosophical-existential changes to the self and what it demands out

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of life will be sufficient to obviate time-wasting. Hence, there must be a subjective-ethical dimension to the politics of time. The objective-structural and subjective-ethical dimensions of the struggle for the conditions of the experience of time as free are dialectically interconnected. There are objective pressures that cause subjective conformity with the coercive work and leisure routines of accelerated capitalism. As Jonathan Martineau explains, “capitalism is not merely an economic system, but a social system in which the requirements and the logic of capital accumulation tend to colonise more and more social practices … As value in capitalism is now tied to abstract time, social temporal practices will tend to be similarly tied to clock-time: since capitalist value is inseparable from abstract time, the times of practices from all across the social field will tend to be expressed according to clock time criteria.”53 These temporal values are instilled in us from a very early age, at the same time as we are socialized to demand only what the system can provide as reward for compliance with its routines and time-structures: “The colonization of time is not reducible to the force of time disciplines through mechanical clocks and waged labour as documented by historians, but the workers’ acceptance, however reluctant, of this understanding of time.”54 Once subjective expectations have been correlated with the objective requirements of social reproduction, structural social change becomes extremely difficult, even in times of social crisis. For people whose reward expectations have been aligned with the money-value system, crisis is a disruption of normal expectations and political struggle is often oriented by the demand to restore those conditions of normalcy. Even if socially necessary labour time is reduced and leisure time increased, if people are not open to the experience of time as a matrix of possibilities for life-valuable activity, then the potential of the structural changes will not be fully realized. The subjective dimension of the politics of time is thus an argument in favour of a self-determined and life-coherent rather than empty and unconstrained use of time. Since each life is unrepeatable and it is no longer plausible to approach structural political struggles in the belief that any one in particular will revolutionize existing social conditions in any given

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lifetime unfolding now, the realization of life-value in any existing life will have to depend on finding non-alienated activities and experiences now. Let us assume that normal motivational structures lead people to desire a better rather than a worse life. It follows that the subjective moment of the politics of time begins with each person reflecting upon what they use their time to do, distinguishing what is conditioned or coerced by social forces extrinsic to their biosocial nature and its life-requirements (forces that alienate and/or exploit their life-capacities) from what satisfies those life-requirements and gives life-valuable and valued expression to them. Each subject must exercise their own reflective intelligence, take their own life-activity as the object of reflection, and decide for themselves how to maximize the life-value of their lifetime. In almost any experience or activity, even in the most alienating forms of employment, it will prove possible to distinguish that in it which is coerced to produce money-value from that in it which is lifeserving. Let us take one stereotypical example to illustrate this first step. Garbage collection is a physically demanding and dirty way to make a living, but also vitally important to the hygiene and appearance of our shared living spaces. Few who could choose from an unlimited set of options would choose to be a garbage collector for their entire lifetime. However, it is a social fact that some people are garbage collectors, and about forty hours a week of their lives are given over to the job. From the structural perspective, the goal of garbage collectors should be, in the short term, to reduce their hours of paid employment without proportional loss of pay. That will still leave them with some set of hours in which they must collect garbage. Should this time just be, in a sense, written off as unfree and without life-value? I do not think so. The principle is that human life is meaningful when it is valuable and valued. It is valuable and valued when it makes a real – even if small – contribution to the open-ended unfolding of the human project. In the case of garbage collectors, their labour is life-valuable to the extent that it helps keep neighbourhoods clean and hygienic, and they can value themselves as people who contribute to this essential requirement.55 There is no question here of this simple reinterpretation overcoming the structural forces that determine their labour. The

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labour remains, in its structure, alienated even when the universal life-necessity of its performance is revealed, because it is not freely undertaken but performed only under the compulsion of the need to make money in order to stay alive. However, its content and outcome is not meaningless, but objectively life-valuable. Thus, not all worktime is wasted in meaningless and valueless activity: there is life-value even in this difficult and dirty occupation. The garbage collector’s life time does not therefore become experienced as fully free (that would require social changes to free human life from the system requirement that it have money to exchange for commodified forms of lifenecessity). However, the discovery of life-value even here in this work that few would choose to do can reduce subjective feelings of the worthlessness of the work, and thus the desire to simply use nonwork time as an escape. The point is not to encourage people to adjust their expectations about life to grim, capitalist reality, but to learn to distinguish in every moment of their lives between that which is alienated and that which is life-valuable through generational time. By making this distinction they will begin to see that good lives are not just about atomic pleasures, but making meaningful contributions over the whole course of a life, and a good society is one that allows us to find or create meaning within those necessary activities imposed by our natural and social needs. The temporal dimension of this problem is not how to replace as much human labour as possible with machines so that our entire lifetimes are free from all objective demands, but rather to free as much labour time as possible from alienating structures so that whatever we are doing – working, reposing, playing, thinking – the time in which we are doing it is experienced as free. Let me return once more to the example of garbage collection to help illustrate this next step. In many middle-class neighbourhoods, community cleanup days are common. Well-heeled individuals who might well look down their class-biased noses at garbage collectors willingly don their old jeans and work together with their neighbours to clean up alleys and parks. Because the individuals have freely decided to work together on this collective project, and the hygienic and aesthetic life-value of the work is recognized, they do not feel that their time is being wasted. Rather, they have freely decided to devote some time to this community task –

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the time in which they are actively cleaning (but also interacting in mutually affirmative ways while engaged in the work) is experienced as an open matrix of possibilities for life-valuable activity. No extrinsic power is commanding them, how they go about the job is up to them, and they can work at whatever pace they choose, laughing and joking while they work, while also feeling the strength and satisfaction which comes through labour that engages the body and makes it sweat, until the work has been completed. After the work, drinks can be shared amidst a pervasive feeling of coming together joyously as a community to do work that needs to be done in ways that build the bonds of friendship as the work is performed. There is life-value in almost all forms of labour; when it is labour’s conscious purpose, the labour is enjoyable and, as enjoyable (i.e., self-consciously affirmed as a life-valuable use of time), free. Of course, a good life must involve more than work. As Nick Dyer-Witheford reminds us, it also requires “time off … time away. Time off from work … time for play.”56 If a good life is, in general, the free realization and enjoyment of our life-capacities for experience and feeling, thought and imagination, movement and creation, and mutualistic relationship and interaction, in life-coherent ways, then it demands multiple spaces for the development of different constellations of these capacities. Each space for development is also a time for self-development. When people are deprived of life space in which to develop the full range of their core human capacities, their lives are damaged. People can have formally secure access to the life spaces of self-realization and yet not have the time to do so. Most obviously, alienated labour might consume so much time that there is none left for exploring the world, aesthetic cultivation, or healthy and pleasurable mutualistic relationships. That dimension of the problem is structural, and must be met through successful struggles to re-divide socially necessary labour time. Nevertheless, here too there is a subjective dimension. Life can be lived too fast. The subjective politics of time argues with socially impatient people that at least some aspects of their lives need to be slowed down so that they can distinguish between extrinsic goals and intrinsic (non-alienated) standards of excellence and determine how those standards can be met. This aspect has an important

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social expression today in the “slow food” (but really slow life) movement. While it has been criticized (not without some truth) by Marxists as blind to the political limitations of consumerist strategies (local produce, for example, is still a commodity), these criticisms miss the deeper implications of the demand to slow life down.57 Not all Marxists have missed these implications. David Harvey, for example, argues that the twenty-first-century left needs to reject its historical fetishism of technology and speed. “Daily life [must be] slowed down – locomotion shall be leisurely and slow – to maximise time for free activities conducted in a stable and well-maintained environment protected from dramatic episodes of creative destruction.”58 Harvey, perhaps because he is a geographer attentive to the value of the materiality of space, understands that work and nonwork life alike suffer when technology and its machine speeds displace the slower speeds of caring human labour, individual attention, and social interaction in shared material space. As Wendy Perkins argues in her excellent examination of the philosophical, political, and ethical commitments of the slow food movement, its history tracks the acceleration of life as its critical shadow, counter-posing to machine rhythms alternative ways of life in which human creativity, human interaction, and timescales grounded in the human rhythms of experience and enjoyment are dominant. “Arts of the (slow) self are means by which people cultivate a subjectivity based on the affirmation of values such as attentiveness and deliberation as pleasures, not duties. They are also opportunities for shifts in broader articulations of social organization, public culture, and issues of justice and equity, because such slow arts of the self are always situated and practiced within social networks and time cultures.”59 The growing importance of local food movements, the re-invention of ancient craft practices, the return of the weekend local producers’ market, but also social scientific and psychological research suggest that once they are exposed to a slower pace of life and hand-produced goods, people’s experience confirms for them the superior pleasures and the superior life-value of slowing down. Four studies conducted by Tim Kasser and his colleagues found that feelings of subjective well-being increased with the increase of what they called “temporal abundance.” They defined “temporal abundance”

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as having time under one’s own control. “People higher in ta [temporal abundance] reported experiencing more autonomy, competence, and feelings of intimacy with others and reported spending more time pursuing activities related to personal growth, connections to others, and physical fitness; such experiences and activities apparently helped to satisfy people’s psychological needs, to the benefit of their personal well-being.”60 Kasser further notes that subjects who used their free time to cultivate creative capacities and intimate relationships also spent less time consuming energy-wasting commodities, adding an ecological dimension to temporal abundance.61 Considered as a whole, Kasser’s conclusions support my central claims: free time is the matrix for non-alienated forms of labour, and non-alienated forms of labour, and not empty time or consumersociety leisure routines, are essential for the production and experience of life-value and meaning. When we slow ourselves down, we amplify the discernment of our senses, sharpen our intellects, allow situations to unfold and other people to speak their piece; we can feel ourselves as parts of a world revealing its richness to us, and our experiences, and thus our lives as wholes, are enriched by this unfolding. The ecofeminist philosopher Ariel Salleh captures this idea of depth of unfolding experience by contrasting machine time with the idea of time as enduring: “Enduring is a beautiful word. It connotes the enfoldment of time in pleasure and suffering, hardiness and commitment, stability and security. These ways of being are of interest to ecofeminists because they are the qualities of engagement that marginalized workers, women, and subsistence dwellers bring to their material conditions.”62 The experience of enduring time is not limited to women and other oppressed groups. Frédéric Gros’s short treatise on walking is a superb articulation of the value of enduring time: “The eye is quick, active, it thinks it has understood everything, grasped it all. When you are walking, nothing really moves: it is rather that presence is slowly established in the body. When we are walking, it isn’t so much that we are drawing nearer, more that the things out there become more and more insistent in our body. The landscape is a set of tastes, colours, scents which the body absorbs.”63 Contrast this experience to that of driving through

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the same landscape. At 120 kilometres per hour the landscape is a blur through the window, it has no smell, the engine drowns out any sounds that might be coming from the outside, one can neither reach out and stroke interesting and pleasing textures nor pick and taste any wild fruit or berries that one might come across. The sensorium of the driver is thus impoverished in comparison with the sensorium of the walker, because the machine in which he is encased moves at speeds that make it impossible to fully experience the environment it motors through as fast as possible. This example is a metonym for life in the age of money-valuedriven acceleration. It moves too fast for human thinking, feeling, and relating, and is thus contrary to the speed of life-value creation and enjoyment. It robs us of life-value by hurrying us through experiences, which must endure if they are to yield their truths to us. As Gros correctly notes, acceleration promises to save us time for those lingering experiences, but results in a general intensification of demands on life which make it impossible to concentrate on anything in particular and make life itself seem to go by faster. “The illusion of speed is the belief that it saves time. It looks simple: finish something in two hours instead of three, gain an hour. It’s an abstract calculation, though, done as if each hour of the day were like an hour on the clock, absolutely equal.”64 As we have already seen in the case of Adam’s analysis of the integration of human experience and the experience of time, lived hours are not the same as clock (machine) hours. Time experienced in integral unity with activities changes as the activities change, while the clock marches on relentlessly at the same tempo, abstracted from qualitative changes and indifferent to the world of life it imperiously measures. In contrast to clock time and the machine time it serves and measures, it is possible to slow down (but also speed up) our experience of the passage of time. In general, slow activities slow our sense of the passage of time: “Haste and speed accelerate time, which passes more quickly, and two hours of hurry shorten a day. Every minute is torn apart by being segmented, stuffed to bursting. You can pile a mountain of things into an hour. Days of slow walking are very long: they make you live longer, because you have allowed every hour, every minute, every second, to breathe, to deepen.”65 The

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technotopians look to machines to radically lengthen our lives, but in reality have given themselves over to the very social forces responsible for accelerating life and making it seem to go by all too quickly. Life can be long enough to be meaningful and good if we return from the inhuman tempo of machines to a pace of life determined by the body’s senses, movements, and thoughts and the enduring presence of nature, artifacts, and other people. Slowing life down means that more life-value can be created and enjoyed because the senses can be more fully engaged, thoughts can develop more fully, and relationships can be cultivated on the basis of deeper knowledge of each other that unfolds through the drawn-out encounters in which people reveal who they are. While I believe that the argument above can be readily confirmed by experience, it is nevertheless vulnerable to the objection that human society cannot simply return to a past age of handicraft production as if the industrial and information revolutions did not happen. Moreover, communication technologies have another side: they expand the number of connections it is possible to establish between different selves, making new forms of relationships possible while combatting narrow parochialism and the privileged inequalities that often attach to it.66 On top of that, not every experience is improved by being slowed down, and some experiences which are worth having for the sheer thrill must be fast. A needlessly slowed recovery from surgery is not more life-valuable than a quick recovery (since it restores the patient to the full range of her life-capacities sooner) and a slow roller coaster would be unbearably boring. These objections have some truth, but they can be met by shifting the focus from velocity per se (fast/slow) to the real question: is the unfolding of the particular experience and activity allowed to take place according to the immanent demands of fulfillment or consummation, or is it determined from the outside by the extrinsic demands of money and coercive power? Where duration and temporal sequence are integrated with experience and activity, time is experienced as an open matrix within which experience and activity unfold towards fulfillment and consummation. Where life is reduced to mechanical response to an imposed structure of money-serving routine, time is experienced as a

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coercive extrinsic power. What really matters, then, is not how fast or slow in the abstract a process or experience is, but whether the pace is appropriate to the temporal duration that the process or experience requires for its fulfilling realization. Following Karen Davies I will call the experience of time-activity integration “process time.”67 She defines process time as “letting the task at hand, or the perceived needs of the receivers of care, rather than the clock, determine the temporal relation. Things take the amount of time they need to take.”68 She developed the term in cooperation with Scandinavian feminists who were studying caring work (raising children, tending to the needs of the sick or elderly). Davies elaborates: “Process time permeates [caring work]. The need for this form of time is chiefly related to what Scandinavian feminists have named the rationality of caring … Consciousness and agency, on the part of the carer, are not primarily influenced by a ‘technicallimited’ rationality, where instrumentality and economic motives are primary determinants … but rather the capacity to take the needs and reality of the care receiver into account. This other orientation involves putting the care receiver’s interests first; showing understanding and empathy; showing flexibility … making the other person’s life qualitatively better.”69 The caring relationship exemplifies an experience of time in which the demands of the task, and not the clock on the wall, determine the time it takes to attend to the needs of the care receiver. Assuming (which it is not, in contemporary conditions, always safe to do) that caregivers feel affirmed and not alienated in their work, then the time in which they are actively caring is experienced as free. They would feel constrained if they did not have the time to care fully for the needs of the care receiver; i.e., if the organization of work by clock time interfered with the quality of care. They are sensitive to the fact that the life-value of the process (caring for the children) ought to determine the organization of the activity and the time it takes. Process time can be applied in all contexts of human life, at work and outside of work, as the criterion that distinguishes the experience of time as free from the experience of time as coercively imposed. At work, if you have the time it takes to finish a project, then

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time bends and conforms to the demands of the work. Time in this case is an open matrix of possibilities – if an unexpected difficulty arises, you have time to work through the unforeseen difficulty and get the job done correctly. Compare that to the alternative in which the boss insists that the project be completed by a fixed deadline. In this case, time is a closed structure of imposed routines that is inflexible and indifferent to material realities of the work. In personal life we can make the same distinction. One of the great joys of life is a conversation that generates a forward momentum so powerful that we lose consciousness of the passage of clock time and cease to care about any other demands the world is making on us. We stop worrying about what we must do next and allow ourselves to be carried along in the stream of shared ideas. The opposite is a hurried chat that is cut short because someone has to run off to an appointment, before a genuine dialogue begins to emerge. Such events are always touched by regret. These examples show that what matters in process time is not duration as an independent variable (longer and slower is always better) but that experiences are allowed to unfold unfettered by abstract clock-time considerations. Life-value emerges through processes of core human capacity realization but is consummated in completed experiences and activities. What Davies says about caring work is generalizable across the various forms of life-valuable activity and experience: “Needs are frequently unpredictable and the relation on which the care is premised often requires continuity and a form of time that is not primarily determined by a quantitative and abstract conceptual measure. Care requires process time.”70 “By ‘naming’ this form of time,” Davies adds, “carers can get a better grasp on the content of their work and thereby evaluate its complexity … Society and policy makers thus need to understand that time is not solely an abstract concept that can be measured by the clock … Policy makers need to make room for process time … if care worth the name is to be provided.”71 People who work outside the caring professions can appreciate the deeper and more general point. Why is that everyone feels disappointment when the clock interrupts something they enjoy? Because an extrinsic demand on their time has disrupted the flow of an intrinsically valuable, nonalienated experience.

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In process time, we give ourselves over to the experience, activity, or relationship. That is, the good in life requires devotion, relaxation of the instrumental-egocentric drive to dominate the object for the sake of openness to its proper complexity and richness – to let the experience endure, to recall Salleh. Any practice or process, to be fully and freely realized, must unfold in process time, that is, according to the intrinsic demands of the practice, not a set time frame imposed on the basis of money-value calculations. The poet cannot “master language” and produce a poem on demand for a client (not a good one, anyway); the poet must give themselves over to language and let the proper words reveal themselves, however long that might take. In science too, answers do not arrive on demand but emerge only gradually and in response to patient attention. People might feel instant attractions to one another, as friends or lovers, but really getting to know someone else requires giving oneself over to the experience of the other while still sharing oneself, a process that cannot be limited to a determinate timeframe. So too with learning: classes might be organized on a regular schedule and degrees arbitrarily marked off into year-long blocks of time, but learning unfolds according to its own pace – sometimes insight is gained in a flash of inspiration, but the deepening of knowledge will occur as long as one devotes oneself to the object of study. There is no pre-set end to what can be learned from a text, a painting, or a natural process or structure. Aristotle, Dante, and Fra Angelico continue to repay study every bit as much as contemporary philosophers, poets, and painters. Process time is temporal experience organized by the demands that the object of attention imposes upon the subject to pay attention so that the subject is open to its full richness. When we pay attention, we do not notice the passage of clock time, because our attention is “absorbed” in the other. Jean-François Lyotard captures the implications of this “absorption” quite well. Although he is focusing on the way in which art is capable of capturing our attention because it presents to our senses something they could not have anticipated, his point is generalizable to all forms of life-valuable activity and experience. “The donation itself is fundamental, originary. What happens to us is not at all something we have fundamentally controlled, programmed. How could it test us if we already know …

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of what, with what, for what, it is done.”72 Science, just as much as the experience or creation of art, and everyday encounters with strangers, just as much as the non-dogmatic interpretation of philosophical texts, require this openness to having our attention seized by the object (the person, the artwork, the experiment to test the hypothesis) and the patience to let it reveal itself to our questions and curiosity. This revelation unfolds in process time. The core of my argument is that the life-value of the experiences and activities that make life good and worth living requires that we pay attention to the object of experience, activity, and relationship, give ourselves over to it, and allow it to unfold its content at the pace and for as long a time as the content requires to unfold itself. Structural changes to the socio-economic dynamics and money-value system of accelerated capitalism are necessary but not sufficient conditions for the realization of good and meaningful lives. Individual human beings, through the reflective self-criticism that philosophy enables, also have to change their own desire and motivation structures – psychosocial structures that have been deliberately cultivated by the ruling institutions and ideology of accelerated capitalism – if they are to undertake the political work it would require to change the temporal dynamics of society and build a new one in which sustained attention and patience are possible across the entire spectrum of life experience and activity. Moreover, if life is to be meaningful and good even under alienated conditions, everyone must learn to pay attention and live according to process time as far as they can each day. This inescapable demand of finite embodied life thus poses the question of what the primary forms and content of non-alienated activity are. Thus far I have shown that life is worth living, but not forever, and only in temporal structures that are conducive to the full unfolding and consummation of the life-value of experience, activity, and relationships. Yet, I have also emphasized that all experience and activity is limited by the frames of finitude that function as intrinsic limits on the extent and duration of all experience and activity. If the technotopians were wrong to rebel against these intrinsic limits, falsely seeing them as extrinsic limits that have not yet been technically mastered, I have not yet proved that I am right to see them as

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constitutive frames of meaningful and good lives. It may be the case that the good depends upon process time, but it remains to be proven that the good is not only compatible with, but dependent upon, the fundamental frames of embodied finitude.

chapter 4

Frames of Finitude and Non-alienated Labour I: Dependence, Disease, and Old Age Near the beginning of Thomas Mann’s magisterial The Magic Mountain there is an “Excursus on Time,” but it is not until the end of the novel that its foreshadowing function becomes clear. The entire novel, with its mass of bewitching details about the morbid luxury of the sanatorium, instantiates the paradox upon which the “Excursus” comments. Fascinated by the minutiae of life on the mountain, the reader is shocked at the end to discover just how much time Hans Castorp has spent there. Mann’s point is that when we are engaged in trivial things, the passage of small units of time is slowed, but great temporal expanses fly by beneath our notice, while when we are engaged in the difficult work of struggling with meaningful problems, we lose track of short units of time, but the growth that we experience through those struggles make our lives feel full and complete. “Vacuity, monotony, have, indeed, the property of lingering out the moment and the hour and of making them tiresome. But they are capable of contracting and dissipating the larger, the very large time-units, to the point of reducing them to nothing at all. And conversely, a full and interesting content can give wings to the hours and the day; yet it will lend to the general passage of time a weightiness, a breadth and solidity which cause the eventful years to flow far more slowly than those poor, bare, empty ones over which the wind passes and they are gone.”1 A long life must be full of challenges to the limits of our intellectual, creative, and emotional capacities. In chapter 3 I argued that the proper object of temporal struggle is not time itself, but the experience of time as an alienating and coercive force. Having explained the basic outlines of the objective and subjective politics of time required to solve that social problem, we must now turn to the problem of what, in general, must be done in life to make it meaningful and good.

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As chapter 3 showed, we live within time, and as the next three chapters will show, we also live within material frames of finitude. As material systems and necessary frameworks, nature, other people, our own bodies, and a finite lifetime are barriers to the realization of every egocentric demand we might imagine ourselves making. That does not mean that they are oppressive extrinsic limitations to the realization of the human good. On the contrary, as frames of finite life they are constraints that enable the realization of meaningful and good human capacities. They challenge us to realize those capacities in ways that are satisfying for the self but also contribute to the further unfolding of the human project in ways that are valuable and valued by others. In this chapter I will concentrate upon those frames of finitude that we are, in a sense, born into: dependence upon nature, liability to illness, and old age.

4.1 Frames of Finitude and Non-Alienated Labour The pessimists looked at these frames of finitude and saw reasons that spoke in favour of not being born. The technotopians looked at these frames of finitude and saw extrinsic limitations for which a technological fix had not yet been found. What both failed to recognize was the positive value of these frames. A frame around a painting or photograph serves to mark the artwork off from the rest of the world. It is not part of the content of the art work, but it gives it coherence. Even if the frame is just the edge of the canvas or the photograph, it is a positive limitation that says “look here, focus here, here is where the beauty is.” Without a frame, there would be no difference between art and the things of the world, which is to say, no art. So too, I will argue, with these frames of finitude: they are not part of the content of the life-value of human existence, but they serve to mark off our life and elevate it above mere thinghood. They concentrate attention on our being here as specific persons with a finite amount of time and capacity to do some things and not others. They say to each of us: “Look here, focus on what you are doing right now.” They help us focus on the sorts of work upon ourselves and the world that produce the life-value which makes our lives good.

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Another way to put this point is to say that life-activity worth enjoying is the product of essentially creative and non-alienated labour. Non-alienated labour is distinguished from play and pastimes by the positive necessity that impels us to do it and the meaning it creates. Play, while intrinsically valuable and a necessary component of good lives, lacks the sort of necessity that motivates non-alienated labour and makes it the real source of meaning in life. We can play or not play, and nothing of fundamental significance is changed. The positive necessity I am talking about stems from the demands that our form of biosocial life imposes upon us, to which we must respond in order to meet each other’s needs. If we do not respond, someone is harmed. In so responding to the pull of life-necessity we make ourselves valuable and valued members of societies and unique individuals. It is service to this positive necessity that makes the activity valuable: as an immediate tending to one’s own or other’s needs, and as a lifelong telos guiding a vocation we feel compelled to follow. We need to play in order to be whole individuals, but no activity that we would associate with play (games, amusements, hobbies) is necessary in the ways in which non-alienated labour is necessary. Without opportunities for serving others through the ways we make ourselves real, our lives lack meaningful connection and purpose. Without opportunities for play our lives would be less enjoyable. But an enjoyable life – as Mann made clear – can become vacuous and tiresome: play easily becomes pure boredom if not contrasted with the hard but satisfying work of living. To free life from this positive necessity would be to deprive it of all meaningful substance. The good life is not easy in all respects: it demands that we respond creatively to real problems and challenges. The inner drive by which we seek them out and overcome them is the drive towards non-alienated labour. It is, as a motivation for creative, life-serving, affirmative labour, the inner cause of our positive freedom, the active expression of ourselves in nature and society as transformative, constructive powers. As opposed to what Marx called alienated labour – work that was commodified, waged, stultifying, and forced – non-alienated labour is free self-activity, the realization of our capacities for affirmative sensuous experience, mutualistic relationships, and creative world-

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transformation and valuing of the same. For Marx, the realization of non-alienated labour lay in the future, in a socialist society that had overcome the structural barriers that capitalism imposes on our capacity for free self-realization. I do not disagree with this conclusion. However, each of us lives in the present and not the future. Whether Marx intended it or not, his emphasis on the need for total emancipation before labour could be non-alienated has the effect of devaluing the present. Yet, if our present is de-valued and the future socialist society never arrives, it would follow that all human life is debased and devalued. While capitalism does debase and devalue paid work, impose unjustifiable levels of deprivation on the majority of people, and threaten catastrophic environmental damage, it does not destroy the value of human life, because it does not make all forms of non-alienated labour impossible. To find the zones in which non-alienated labour is possible, we need to look outside the factory gates and office walls. I look outside the institutions of paid work not because I wish to make abstract and apolitical existential arguments, but because I want to vindicate the value of everyday non-alienated labour and meaning in life as it must be lived now. There seems to me nothing political or progressive to delaying meaning and value to a future that might never arrive. In my use of the term, non-alienated labour is all experience and activity that is undertaken under the positive constraints of human finitude, that serves a life-necessity, and that is steered by the goals of creating meaning, forging mutualistic relationships, and contributing to the present or future good of others. Taken together all these forms of non-alienated labour advance the human project, of which each should be a contributing and valued member. Non-alienated labour produces both instrumental and intrinsic life-value, even in the case that the labour is undertaken within an otherwise alienating and exploitative society. As the work that any self that is attuned to the reality of its material conditions of life must do to produce lifevalue for itself and others, non-alienated labour is essential to meaningful, good lives under any social conditions.

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4.2 Dependence on Nature Human beings are biosocial agents dependent upon nature for their basic means of life-support. Human potential fully unfolds only in institutionally mediated social relations governed by a life-grounded value system which has overcome the extrinsic barriers to self-determining freedom. However, no ruling value system can overcome the forms of dependence that impose upon us the need to understand and work upon the natural world. The most basic form of non-alienated labour is bound up with the struggle to understand the external world. The struggle to understand and change the world is a fundamental source of meaning in our lives. I do not maintain that the life-value of this struggle for knowledge and change can be understood reductively as mere survival. At the same time, if knowledge and change were not, at root, a matter of life or death, the intrinsic value that human beings derive from knowledge, creative practice, and relationships would also disappear, since the frames of finitude that provide the initial motivation would be absent. If we did not depend upon the external world it would not be an object of wonder but rather indifference, nothing more than a screen upon which to project our internally generated fantasies. Human life has an evolutionary history that explains its genome, its physiology, its basic organic life-requirements, and the fundamental forms of our human capacities: sensation, imagination, thought, movement, creative activity, relationship building. That we are members of nature like all other living things means that we must maintain connections to an independent material reality if we are to survive. The most basic forms of this connection concern access to the physical inputs our bodies require for their energy and nutritional needs. Let us set aside the political and economic problems surrounding food for the moment in order to ask why food, and its production, matter to human beings. The answer seems simple enough, although contained within the seeming obviousness of the answer is a philosophical point of universal significance for understanding the material conditions for meaningful life. Food matters to human beings because if we do not regularly eat, we will die. Given the fact that human beings require food, we are motivated to understand the world from which our food

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derives. We have investigated soils and climate conditions and have learned to hybridize plants to optimize yields in local conditions. We have learned to farm animals and integrate their waste cycles with the need to replenish soil nutrients. We have learned how to store food so that it does not spoil and harm us, and how to prepare it in pleasing forms. In sum, one of the most fundamental relationships that human beings have to the natural world is the need to find food in it. This never-relenting web of material enmeshment generates perhaps the oldest form of non-alienated labour there is: farming. The contemporary struggle to free farming from agri-business and return it to an environmentally sustainable community practice is strong evidence of the truth of this claim.2 One of the leaders of this movement, Vandana Shiva, traces her own activism to the struggles of India to free itself from colonial domination by ensuring that it was self-sufficient in food. Initially, the main focus of self-sufficiency was traditional village-based agriculture. In the wake of the struggle to free itself from British rule, India found itself facing an agricultural crisis. In response, India’s first agriculture minister, K.M. Kushi, called for careful study of the conditions in which local agriculture flourished, and those in which it floundered. His conclusions articulate very clearly the way in which meaning is generated by non-alienated labour upon the land. “Study the life cycle of the village,” he argued. “Find out where the cycle has been disturbed and estimate the steps necessary for restoring it … Nothing is too mean and nothing is too difficult for the man who believes that the restoration of the life-cycle is not only essential for the freedom and happiness of India, but is essential for her very existence.”3 Three interrelated aspects of Kushi’s argument are important. First is the implication of his claim that meaningful labour grows from interaction with the natural foundations of life. When he says that “nothing is too mean” for the person engaged in restoring the lifecycle, he indicates that meaning grows from the ground up. Our minds are capable of world-transcending contemplation, but they cannot function without food. Those who devotes themselves to restoring the capacity of a community to grow food are thus not debasing their intellect, but utilizing it in one of the most life-serving ways possible.

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Hence, the second point: the struggle to understand and restore the power of the land to provide food is at the same time a struggle to restore to health the local village culture, which has co-developed with its food-providing function. “Making peace with the earth,” to use Shiva’s term, is at the same time to make peace with each other. But the motivation for restoring ties of social interdependence develops within the material framework of the natural relationship of dependence on the earth. The dignity of village life grows out of its vital role in sustaining the entire country. The third aspect develops out of the first two. Local food production is essential for political independence and freedom. Political independence and freedom, therefore, are not first and foremost artifacts of constitutional documents and declarations; they are functions of the non-alienated work of the whole nation committing itself to the “mean” labour of planting, growing, harvesting, and sharing food. Kushi’s argument makes it clear that while the human relationship to food goes beyond the need to eat, it is unlikely that it would have the profound symbolic value in our lives that it does if it were not so integrally connected to their maintenance. My point is that food would not be such a ubiquitous object of art or prayer or cultural ritual if human beings did not require it to sustain life. Think of the role of the “bread of life” in the Christian Mass. In this metaphor Enrique Dussel argues the whole “essence of Christianity” is contained, invoking “the links between bread as the fruit of common human labour, exchanged among those who produce it, and bread as the substance of the Eucharistic offering.”4 One could no doubt find analogous meanings assigned to food in other spiritual traditions. Its life-sustaining function is the cause of the extraordinary attention we pay to its cultivation, creation, distribution, and interpretation. This attention is then the material foundation for the artistic and ritualistic constructions and uses of food. To be sure, these ritualistic and aesthetic functions have their own social and spiritual value, but the reason why they have become rituals is that without food there is no human life. In every case of non-alienated labour, our dependence and interdependence on things and people outside of ourselves concentrate attention on the life-value of the object or relationship. If the dependence

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and interdependence were broken, so too would be the need to pay attention, and thus also the need to undertake the non-alienated labour the attention enables (the positive necessity noted above). Since nonalienated labour is the source of meaning in our lives, loss of the reason to undertake non-alienated labour would mean loss of meaning and life-value in that dimension of experience and activity. Since the domains of activity we are examining are essential to human life, the loss of reasons to undertake non-alienated labour in these domains cannot be compensated for by any substitute satisfaction. Let us return for a moment to Kushi’s claim in order to better explain this conclusion. Kushi recognizes that the struggle for social freedom of action grows up from the most fundamental material interactions with the natural world. Freedom is not, as Marx argued, a realm outside of and beyond natural necessity into which we enter only in the age of machine-produced abundance.5 Human dependence on nature never goes away, and that fact is good, or at least a condition of the good, because it encourages us to pay attention to the things of the world and our relationships to them. The uncertainties that material dependence introduces into human life are the objective side of the existential freedom I discussed at the end of chapter 2. Existential freedom, recall, is the power to decide how to act in the face of an uncertain future such that that future becomes different from what it would have been had one acted differently (or not at all). Subjectively, this power to decide is anchored in our capacities to reflect, deliberate, construct alternatives, and move ourselves to individual or collective action through choice. All choice, however, occurs within a material frame. Hence, the objective side of existential freedom is the need to choose in order to survive. Human survival is not guaranteed, is not an automatic outcome of our genetic program. We are charged with the task of understanding the world we live in and making decisions on the basis of what we think will best serve our interests. We can be wrong, and because being wrong can cost us everything, we have to take seriously and value the work needed to make the choice, and the content of the choice we make. Hans Jonas perfectly articulates the underlying thought at work here: “Life’s insufficiency, on the one hand, is both a sign and the very measure of the freedom to which the organism is committed in relation

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to its own concretion. Metabolism essentially includes these two sides, which means that the liberty of life is itself its peculiar necessity. Its being, suspended in possibility, is to be actualized by the use of the world. The power to use the world, this unique prerogative of life, has its precise reverse in the necessity of having to use it.”6 Our dependence upon nature is thus a positive life-necessity that motivates the basic forms of action in and on the world from which our full self-creative freedom develops. Contrast the non-alienated labour of producing food and the social life-value of sharing, painting, and praying for it with the technotopian view. Kurzweil’s hope is to abolish the material necessity of eating so that the purely pleasurable act of tasting food can be experienced without organic limit. If my argument is correct, then it is unlikely that tasting and consuming food your body does not in any way ever require would long be felt as a pleasurable activity. The pleasure of eating is not only in the taste of the food, but also in the feeling of the body’s energy being replenished. While it is true that not everything that tastes good is nutritionally good, or that human beings only eat to satisfy hunger, it is the case that the value of food derives from its life-necessity. The care we take to present and flavour food has emerged, historically, within the framework of its lifesustaining function. The android character Data on the Star Trek: The Next Generation television series has taste buds, but never derives any pleasure from eating and, indeed, only eats in the company of human beings, as an effort to belong. Of course, a television character is not a knock-down argument, but the writers were remarkably sensitive to the connection between eating and living. Data will never know the joy of eating because he will never experience his body growing in energy and vitality and joy as a result of it. At this point I want to turn my attention explicitly to the cognitive side of the non-alienated work our dependence on nature enables, and in particular, the general features of science considered as non-alienated labour. When scientific work is alienated it is forced to serve the growth of money-value. When it serves money-value, it ignores the principle of life-coherence as it pertains to scientific truth: it must not only concern conclusions which are supported by evidence and sound reasoning, “it must also enable rather than disable

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life and life-systems.”7 The vocation of science itself, to systematically struggle across generations to make the objects of human knowledge adequate to the elements, structures, forces, and law-like regularities of the physical universe, is life-coherent, since life requires that we do not make fundamental mistakes about the effects natural forces will have on us. The context in which science emerges and which gives it the profound importance it has is its capacity to understand the causal structure of the material universe upon which we are dependent. On the individual level, it is true, as both Aristotle and Descartes argued, that the scientist is motivated by wonder. “When our first encounter with some object surprises us and finds it novel … this causes us to wonder and to be astonished at it. Since all this may happen before we know whether or not the object is beneficial to us, I regard wonder as the first of all the passions.”8 This world is not make-believe but the unforgiving material world in which we live. Thus, our more basic needs to live and grow are material frames within which our wonder develops and draws our attention ever outward, to the magnificence and danger that nature presents to the senses and intellect. Wonder is the first of all the passions, according to Descartes, but the function of all the passions, including wonder, is to conduce human beings towards that which sustains and enables our lives: “The function of all the passions consists solely in this, that they dispose the soul to want the things that nature deems useful for us, and to persist in this volition.”9 Scientific understanding develops and unfolds within the frame of our dependence on the natural world. It widens the scope of our activity through the insights it generates about what is possible, but always within the physical limits of the natural world. Again, contrast this position with Kurzweil’s. For Kurzweil, the body and materially independent nature seem to be barriers to the full flowering of scientific understanding because he believes that too much of the brain’s information-processing power is wasted on lifesupport functions. If we were not vulnerable biosocial agents but superintelligent machines, knowledge acquisition and transfer would be virtually instantaneous. “A key advantage of non-biological intelligence is that machines can easily share their knowledge. If you learn

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French or read War and Peace, you can’t simply download that learning to me, and I have to acquire that knowledge in the same painstaking way you did.”10 Kurzweil here fails to ask the crucial question: why would a computer want to learn French or read War and Peace? What matters to human beings – being able to communicate across linguistic and cultural differences, gaining insight into those differences through studying literature and appreciating it for the beauty of its imaginative constructions, understanding our biochemistry because we care about each other’s lives and want them to be as healthy as possible – would not matter to an invulnerable superintelligence. While it is true that knowledge involves some operations which are analogous to the information-processing functions of a computer, Kurzweil ignores an essential difference between “number crunching” and human knowledge – the qualitative dimensions of meaning and mattering that drive it and the way in which meaning and mattering are inescapably bound up with our vulnerabilities. Those human beings who have devoted themselves to philosophical or scientific pursuits care about knowledge because they believe it makes a difference to human life, not just their own professional reputations. Physicists are surely being honest when they claim to marvel at the elegance of the equations that describe the basic forces of the universe, but it could not have been the elegance of those equations that first motivated people to inquire into those forces, since the inquiry long predates the mathematics in which the equations are now expressed. The equations are the mathematical outcome of the deeper motivating drive to understand the material universe that gave rise to us and that enables us to keep living. At the most basic level, science is one essential dimension of the knowledge that human beings require to live and live fully, in as complete an understanding of this universe, our home, as we can produce over an open-ended number of generations of non-alienated scientific work. Viewed in this light, scientific understanding is life-valuable because it helps us with the struggles our finitude poses. It cannot solve the ultimate problem of finitude because dependence, interdependence, liability to disease, limited life-capacity, and death are not scientific problems. Science too faces its own immanent limitations in terms of the incapacity of its methods to explain in a philosophically satisfy-

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ing way the meaning and purpose of existence. Rather than undermining scientific knowledge, this limit marks out science’s proper domain, within which it struggles to make its theories adequate to a reality that continually proves more opaque and complex than earlier generations of scientists thought. As the limitations that our finitude imposes on us motivate us to undertake the difficult non-alienated labour of living, so too does the limitation that the complexity of the objective world imposes on the completion of the scientific project pose the challenges that motivate ever-new generations of scientists. Each success hitherto has proven only a temporary plateau before the next set of problems reveals itself. History offers no evidence to support the technotopian belief that there is some technological resolution of the dialectic of insight and ignorance that has thus far defined the history of science. As long as human beings are the scientists, that dialectic will never end, because human beings are always capable of disagreeing, rethinking, reinterpreting a world that also changes as our thinking and practice change. Total transparency of nature to the human mind is therefore impossible (we change some aspects of nature as we change the ways we think and act within it) and even if it were possible, it would be a self-undermining achievement. The perfection of science would be its end, and thus yet another loss of a source of non-alienated, life-valuable labour. The philosophy graduate, the mathematician who proves a theorem, and the physicists who discover a new particle are not celebrating the success of the machines that they might have used to help them realize their project. They are celebrating the successful outcome of a struggle – personal and collective – with the opacity of the objective world, which yields truths to humanity only grudgingly, in response to tireless efforts. More importantly, these struggles matter. Scientists, philosophers, and everyone who thinks about their lives do so, if their practice is life-coherent, because life can be better or worse, and we need to know how to advance the conditions that support the former and avoid the latter. The knowledge of the conditions that make for better or worse lives is the ever-unfolding outcome of the transhistorical, cross-cultural, interdisciplinary scientific-philosophicalpolitical-artistic-practical project of creating a good human world out of the givenness of nature.

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When we interpret knowledge not simply as information processing but as a caring cognitive relationship to the natural and social fields that support life and enable the development of our core human capacities, an essential link between truth and life-value emerges. The link between truth and life-improvement was essential to ancient philosophy, but it disappeared behind the veil of instrumental reasoning typical of modern science, which, since Descartes, has rejected deliberation about ends and values as unscientific.11 However, as we have already seen in the case of Descartes, even those who reject the scientificity of thinking about ends in one dimension bring them back in as the motivation for the whole scientific enterprise – improving human life. The physicist Steven Weinberg, who famously said that the more we know about the universe the more we know it has no point, explains, in a self-criticism, that he did not therefore mean that human existence has no purpose: “In my 1977 book, The First Three Minutes, I was rash enough to remark that ‘the more the universe was comprehensible, the more it seems pointless.’ I did not mean that science teaches us that the universe is pointless, but rather that the universe itself suggests no point. I hastened to add that there were ways in which we ourselves could invent a point for our lives, including trying to understand the universe.”12 Even at its most seemingly distant remove from service to life, the value of science is tied to the challenge of serving and improving it. An example will clarify my point. In a widely read recent essay, Atul Gawande reflects on the vexed relationship between medical science and mortality. His own practice has led him to the insight that medical science must work with people to accept their humanity (that is, their mortality), rather than pretend that staving off death always yields more life worth living. Rejecting the technotopian dream of life unending, Gawande understands that medicine fails to provide the best possible care to people when it rests on false hopes and when those false hopes drive it to over-treat people with terminal illnesses. Death is not a failure of medical science; it is the inevitable outcome of a human life. Good scientific medicine must accept the finitude of human life, ensuring that people live the healthiest lives possible while they

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are able, but knowing when to stop treatment for the good of the terminally ill as well. “Before I began to think about what awaits my older patients … I’d never ventured beyond my surgical office to follow them into their lives. But once I’d seen the transformation in elder care under way, I was struck by the simple insight on which it rested, and by its profound implications for medicine … And that insight was that as people’s capacities wane, whether through age or ill health, making their lives better often requires curbing our purely medical imperatives – resisting the urge to fiddle and control.”13 Understanding human finitude means understanding the limits of scientific knowledge and practice. Accepting these ultimate limits on science’s control of the life process makes it better science. Human dependence on a natural world independent of our wills means that our survival and development are perpetually under threat. Living life under these conditions has not led the species to reject life as intolerable, as the pessimists argued it ought to have, but to constantly question our place and purpose within the whole and undertake physical and intellectual non-alienated labour to secure that place. As we develop intellectually, it becomes apparent to each of us that the natural world does not regard the maintenance of our existence as an imperative it is bound to obey. If our lives are going to be meaningful, we will have to discover or create that meaning for ourselves. Creating meaning is thus essentially bound up with the struggle to understand nature and put its forces to work in the service of our lives, all the while learning about and respecting the ultimate limits we are powerless to control but must live and work within. Irving Singer articulates the general normative point at issue here clearly: “Not only do active creatures behave as if their immediate concerns are valuable, but also words like ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ ‘right’ and ‘wrong,’ ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’ – the terminology of value in general – must ultimately refer back to the needs, the drives, the impulses, the feelings and motives that arise from an organism’s struggle to exist … Life has meaning for creatures that engage in the active preservation of their mode of existence.”14 If the bonds of dependence on nature that our needs generate were ever completely severed, there would no longer

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be any point to science, or philosophy, or any other mode of inquiry that derives its value and the pleasures proper to its practice from the contribution it makes to maintaining, preserving, developing, and understanding life.

4.3 Liability to Disease Non-alienated work on the world and on ourselves is the source of life’s meaning and goodness. Nevertheless, as the pessimists understood, no matter how good life is at any moment, it is threatened at every turn by disease. It would be absurd to argue that diseases are not harmful. They are a paradigmatic form of the harms to which living beings are liable. While the pessimists were correct to identity disease as a cause of harm, the overwhelming desire to live despite liability to it seems to prove that people reject the pessimistic conclusion that it would be better to not have been born. This desire to live is as universal a desire as there is amongst human beings, who everywhere accept enormous hardships, sometimes for no more than the pleasure of drawing another breath or sipping water to quench a thirst. The universality of the struggle for life everywhere grounds the dignity and life-value of the scientific study of the body, medicine, and healing arts in the widest sense. My alternative to the technotopian demand to overcome liability to disease does not assert that disease and organic decline are in themselves life-valuable. Anything that diminishes or destroys the realization of core human capacities is in this respect harmful. Instead, I argue that liability to disease and the naturalness of aging are, like dependence and interdependence, forms of finitude that elicit from us forms of non-alienated work (for healthy societies, for an aging self that continues to act and develop in ways that differ from the activity of youthful selves). These forms of non-alienated work produce more life-value than imagined lives without liability to disease and aging would. I do not thereby regard disease with indifference or reject scientific medicine, but I do see the primary virtues of medicine as healing and caring for bodies when they become ill, not valour in a militarized struggle against an enemy it would be best to eliminate entirely.

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Individual liability to disease forces us to think about how best to maintain social health, because social health is an essential factor in the health of individuals. As we will see, the causes of disease are not abstractly natural (the invasion of the body by a pathogen) but equally social. Health is not achieved as the outcome of an individuated “battle” against disease, but is a result of collective efforts to ensure that the social conditions of health are satisfied for each and all. One of the main selling points of the technotopian program was that embodied organisms are liable to devastating diseases and the infirmities of age. Its solution was the complete re-engineering of the human organism to free its information-processing capacities from the frail biological platform in which it is currently trapped. This view represents the extreme wing of a more common view of health and disease as opposites. The goal of medicine and health care systems, in this view, is to ensure health by treating and eradicating the pathogens that cause disease. Aaron Antonovsky calls this position the “pathogenic approach” to the etiology of disease. “The pathogenic orientation is committed to the proposition that diseases are caused by bugs – microbial, psychosocial, chemical, or what have you – singly, as in the germ theory, or multifactorially, as the more sophisticated have it.”15 The ultimate goal of the pathogenic view of disease is its complete eradication. However, so long as we remain beings of flesh, this quest will remain quixotic. Not only will it remain quixotic, it overlooks the role that liability to disease plays in enabling us to actively value our health. Stephen Pender, commenting upon Donne’s reflection on the experience of being gravely ill, notes that ill health intensifies our selfconsciousness. Sickness makes us realize that what is “at stake … is the very thing that suffers: the self.”16 We are always somewhat selfaware, but rarely do we value this self-awareness as such, i.e., as the foundational expression of the goodness of human being: sheer being present in the extraordinary universe of which we happen, for no reason, to be a part. In this self-awareness of sheer being present in the world, as the poet Wallace Stevens wrote, “to be, and to be delighted, were one.”17 If it is sickness that throws us back upon ourselves, then it is sickness that enables us to really value not just this or that experience, but life-experience as a whole. Sickness awakens us to

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the vulnerability of the self, to the fact that it is always at risk, and thus to the need to care for it, not as a general existential disposition (as in Heidegger), but as a moment-to-moment material attentiveness to our life-requirements and the implications of our life-projects. When the future of self-awareness as such is at stake in serious illness, the value of sheer being in the world becomes starkly manifest. “Only by sickness is health validated,” writes Goethe.18 He means that we can only value health if it is periodically absent, because the feeling of being healthy – feeling strong, vigorous, alert, energetic, desirous of experience, activity, and relationship – can be deeply enhanced by contrast with its opposite state. Others go further than Goethe and maintain that a good human life requires physical suffering. Nietzsche is the most famous proponent of this view. “You want, if possible … to do away with suffering … we would rather have it increased … The discipline of suffering, of great suffering – know ye that it is only this discipline that has produced all the elevation of humanity hitherto.”19 In a less dramatic vein, Seneca maintains that suffering is a necessary part of life such that the one whose life is too easy is impoverished, because only through meeting the challenge posed by suffering do we learn our true character: “For if a man is to know himself, he must be tested; no one finds out what he can do except by trying … Great men, I say, rejoice oft-times in adversity, as do brave soldiers in warfare.”20 There is truth in Nietzsche’s and Seneca’s positions. Still, it sounds strange that a materialist ethics concerned with freeing the enjoyed expression of core human capacities from harmful impediments would conclude that disease should be preserved so that we can better value a contrasting state of health. That conclusion would indeed be strange, but it is not the one I draw. My contention is not that disease should be preserved so that we can properly value a fragile life, but rather that disease cannot be eradicated so long as we are finite material beings, and so we need to think of health and health care as other than a “war on disease.” In the case of the program of allopathic medicine, the social implications of the war against disease are that resources tend to be expended on individuated treatments that prioritize abstract states of optimal physiological functioning for the rich over programs that promote healthy

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societies and for everyone. If the prevailing value system identifies health with optimal individual functioning according to an abstract set of purely physiological criteria (blood pressure, glucose levels, etc.) without integrating these criteria into an underlying ethical framework of meaningful experience, activity, and relationships in which physiological states are means rather than ends, then it is more likely to treat “health” as the outcome of the consumption of commodified medicine, pharmaceuticals, and related services (personal trainers, etc.). The more that attention is focused on the sale of services, the more the target of health care becomes the consumer who is willing and able to pay, and the more the socioeconomic and environmental causes of ill health are ignored because they disproportionally affect the lives of the poor who cannot pay for high-end health care products. If it turns out – and it does – that socioeconomic and environmental factors tend to negatively impact the poor more than the rich, then the pathogenic approach to disease tends to favour better health outcomes for the rich than for the poor. Medicine is firmly rooted in universal concern for life, but it can be deployed in such a way that it serves the particular interests of the rich rather than the universal interests of human beings to unfold all of their organic capacities as fully as possible in meaningful projects that are valued and valuable to others. If we start from the position that liability to disease is an ineradicable constitutive frame of human life, different implications follow. For Antonovsky’s “salutogenic approach,” disease is a normal and inescapable part of being alive.21 His approach asserts that technoscientific intervention to restore or maintain an abstract equilibrium in the organism is only one component of an overall health-maintaining public policy. Many diseases can simply be left to run their course – the body has an immune system that should be allowed to work. Moreover, people’s liability to ill health and disease is a factor of the social contexts that structure their lives. Health can be improved by improving people’s conditions of life – eliminating toxins, improving sanitation and diet, and minimizing workplace stress. These socioeconomic factors decisively impact health, but are not objects of the technoscientific “war” against disease. The individuated pathogenic model of disease and technoscientific health care both miss what the World Health Organization calls

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the “social determinants of health.” In the most general sense, the social determinants of health are “the conditions in which people are born, grow, and work.”22 In the simplest terms, they are the “cause of the causes” of ill health – the social factors that make different groups of people more or less vulnerable to disease.23 A generation of study of the social determinants of health has discovered that individual health is promoted more by income, gender and racial equality, universal education, clean natural environments, secure employment, and adequate time for rest and play than by highly developed systems of scientific-technological medicine. “Redistributive welfare systems, in combination with the extent to which people can make a healthy living on the labour market, influence poverty levels. Generous universal social protective systems are associated with better population health, including lower excess morbidity among the old and lower mortality levels among socially disadvantaged groups … Extending social protection to all people, within countries and globally, will be a major step towards seeing health equity in a generation.”24 Yet social policy continues to move in the opposite direction, towards austerity and cutting socialized medicine, at the same time as spectacular sums are spent on “miracle cures” for those who can pay.25 Of all the social determinants of health in a capitalist society, income is the most important, because capitalism’s ruling money-value system turns life-necessities into priced commodities. As Sir Michael Marmot, the chair of the who Commission on the Social Determinants of Health, argues, “In countries at all levels of income, health and illness follow a social gradient: the lower the socio-economic position, the worse the health.”26 Even where there are functioning welfare systems, they nowhere provide income and resources sufficient to access top-quality life-necessities, with the result that even where absolute poverty is avoided, highly unequal health outcomes remain and track income inequality. As a recent Canadian study concludes, “income is perhaps the most important social determinant of health. Level of income shapes overall living conditions, affects psychological functioning, and influences health-related behaviours such as quality of diet … In Canada, income determines the quality of other social determinants of health such as food security, housing, and other basic prerequisites of health.”27 Individual health is of course

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impacted by genetic and pathogenic factors, but overall social health, the proportion of individuals living healthy lives and enjoying a full range of human life capacities in meaningful life-projects, is more a function of the priorities established by the ruling value system than scientific treatment of individual illnesses. Human life is better the more fully its core capacities are expressed and enjoyed in life-coherent ways. Diseases can impede the expression of these capacities, but the existence of disease and diseasecausing organisms are not themselves life-incoherent. Diseases are as natural to living things as health, and disease-causing organisms evolved through the same forces as the hosts they target. It does not follow that a virus has the same life-value as the complex, conscious host organisms it invades, but rather that we must understand the full expression of core human capacities as qualified by the liability to disease that defines us as organisms. Liability to disease becomes a social problem when the distribution of diseases becomes a function not of equal organic liability, but of social inequality and other pathologies of the money-value system. Of course, a good society is a society in which citizens are as healthy and disease-free as organic beings can be. Concern for overall social health draws one’s thinking beyond the narrow compass of the state of one’s own organism to concern for the social determinants of health. Concern for the social determinants of health unites people in caring solidarity with other potential sufferers. Caring solidarity, not warfare, is the guiding value of the healing arts (including scientific medicine) at their best. Because human life is integrally natural and social, concern for health must also be integrally natural and social, as the social determinants of health indeed are. Even if, initially, it is only one’s own health that is the object of concern, materially rational understanding of the conditions of health depends upon understanding the connections that link each person to the natural and social environment. One cannot eat a healthy diet if one lacks the education to distinguish between nutritious food and junk, or if one can only afford unhealthy processed foods; all the exercise in the world will be for naught if one lives surrounded by toxic waste; scientific medicine is of no life-value if it is a priced commodity for which people are unable to pay. Even narrow, egocentric thinking about health, if guided

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by the principle of life-coherence, will lead the individual from mere self-concern to consideration of the overall state of the natural and social worlds. Initially, one might not care about the health of others, but one discovers that the principle of life-coherence makes it impossible not to care about the conditions in which others live, because they are, ultimately, the conditions in which one lives too. When we value our own health, we begin to pay attention to the requirements of healthy living. When we begin to pay attention to the requirements of healthy living, we are drawn out of a closed concern for the optimal functioning of our own organism to see ourselves as enmeshed in a complex of relationships to natural and social environments that neither individuated lifestyle regimens nor individuated medical treatments are sufficient to control. The demand for health, therefore, must be a demand for healthy conditions of life, and the demand for healthy conditions of life is a social and political and not only a scientific or medical demand. Non-alienated work upon the self (exercise, good diet, etc.) expands into work upon the world (cleaning the environment, reducing the power of stressors caused by work, poverty, etc., ensuring that healthy food is widely available and affordable, ensuring appropriate health care is available to all, and so on). My point is that social self-consciousness of one’s own liability to disease is part of what it is to live as a human organism. An expanded circle of care about the social determinants of health begins from consciousness of one’s own material embodiment. No self is powerful enough to determine the total context of its individual life. Hence, as one begins to expand one’s concern for health beyond the body’s functioning to the natural and social conditions in which one lives, a salutogenic concern for the social determinants of health becomes possible. A salutogenic, social-determinants-of-health approach to disease does not focus on the eradication of the liability to disease for those who can pay (as the technotopians demand) but on the satisfaction of the social determinants of health for all. What is unfair and the object of struggle is not that people get sick, but that some people get more sick more often because of corrigible structural inequalities. Our capacity to rise above narrow, egocentric interests to work in caring solidarity for others is often first provoked by cases where dis-

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ease threatens a loved one. The loving despair in the bowed head of the aunt and the embodied depth of connection expressed in the power with which she grips her niece’s arm in Edvard Munch’s magnificent painting The Sick Child is an unsurpassable representation of the depth of love sickness can occasion.28 Confronting illness not only teaches us that taking the existence of loved ones for granted is materially irrational, but also that we cannot insulate ourselves from hardship, that love for others demands we bear the pain of their suffering by standing by and caring for them, even when this care consumes life time that we would choose, if there were no health crisis, to use in other ways. In the midst of crisis, the overriding importance of restoring the health (or comforting the passage to death) of the loved one transforms the goals of the self who is attentive to the needs of the other. One’s own desires are now of secondary importance; indeed, the desire to do anything other than care for the loved one fades. One cannot imagine becoming happy by escaping to some psychic corner and hiding from the terrible reality in which one is enmeshed. Love prevents the flight. Being bound in care and love to others means that we must work on ourselves to produce the strength and depth of character needed to help them through periods of disease-induced suffering. Caring solidarity not only solidifies the bonds between intimates but can also, in public health crises, unite strangers. Art again illustrates the philosophical point clearly. Dr Rieux, the protagonist in Camus’s The Plague, exemplifies the caring solidarity of the healing arts that I am defending. After the local priest claims that Rieux sees a good side to the plague, he responds: “What’s true of all evils in the world is true of plague as well. It helps a man rise above himself.”29 People could not rise above themselves in times of crisis if they did not recognize an identity between themselves and the victims of the disease. What Rieux recognizes is that “the flesh” is subject to all matters of evils, but that is simply the price we pay for being flesh.30 We transcend the evil by struggling together against it, but always in full knowledge that another plague will strike again somewhere else: “‘We’re working side by side for something that unites us, beyond blasphemy and prayers. And it is the only thing that matters’ … ‘Yes, yes,’ he said, ‘you are working for man’s salvation.’ Rieux tried to smile. ‘Salvation’s much too big a word for

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me. I don’t aim so high. I’m concerned for man’s health.’”31 The flesh is born and dies: there is no salvation. However, in between these poles there is life, and that life cannot be good or bad by sheer force of individual will, but depends upon the conditions in which it is lived. We will get sick and die, but these mere facts about embodied organic life need not undermine its value for us. Liability to disease does nevertheless pose a challenge to our happiness. If we cannot, like Rieux, discover the capacity to rise above ourselves, then we are more likely to find our happiness undermined by our (and our loved ones’) liability to disease. There is nothing inevitable about that outcome. Through non-alienated labour on our own motivations, we can attain one of the highest virtues of which humans are capable: to concentrate attention on and attend almost exclusively to the needs of the sick loved one. The technotopians claimed to serve that which is highest in humanity. Yet here again it becomes apparent that what is best in our humanity depends upon the limits our flesh defines and the challenges that follow from confronting those limits. Our liability to disease is a frame within which we build and maintain caring solidarity with others. At the same time, every occasion of caring for someone is an occasion for that someone to let themselves be cared for. Being cared for is not easy, particularly in a society that normalizes a self-interested drive to impose one’s ideas on the world and to always strive to be master of the conditions in which one lives. Disease, by making us physically incapable of self-exertion and putting us in need of others’ care, checks this drive and reminds us of our interdependence and of the value of passivity and openness to what happens. The good of enjoying the expression of life-capacities must be understood in the context of its total material conditions of realization. These material conditions of realization include not only the satisfaction of those life-requirements that are direct physical inputs needed to maintain life and activity, but also the pauses that refresh and the care from others that we require. The value of passivity, of letting ourselves be cared for, runs contrary to the psychology of the money-value system. According to its norms, other people are adversaries to be overcome through constant self-exertion and unceasing activity. Relaxing and relenting are forms of weakness. To anyone growing up under the money-value system,

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relenting, allowing oneself to be cared for, will be difficult because it expresses a deep vulnerability, which is emotionally unsettling for people (especially men who have had masculine gender norms of “toughing it out” imposed upon them). Since it interferes with the accumulation of money-value, allowing oneself time to heal (or making time to care for others who need time to heal) appears as weakness and lack of commitment to the economy, no matter how essential for overall and long-term health resting might be. The money-value system demonizes vulnerability and mocks as weak anyone who relinquishes the reins in order to heal. Children are taught to deny vulnerability and their need for caring others. Hence, we must learn (or re-learn) how to relent and be cared for. Learning to be cared for is necessary because everyone eventually gets sick. It is also instrumentally valuable for long-term health and the expansion of the range and depth of enjoyment of our core human capacities over an entire life. Finally, learning to be cared for is an intrinsically valuable expression of our capacity for deep relationship. Since letting oneself be cared for requires effort, this learning is another form of non-alienated work. Through it we overcome the false and pathological denial of our own vulnerability. The reward for our efforts is not simply restored health, but a deepened capacity for relationship. Nel Noddings, often thought of one-sidedly as a philosopher of caring, is equally a philosopher of being cared for. She recognizes that learning to be cared for requires work: “The attitude of warm acceptance and trust is important in all caring relationships … caring is completed in all relationships by the apprehension of caring in the cared for.”32 Learning to be cared for is thus essential to understanding the reciprocity essential to all nondominating relationships. As Singer said, we need to love and be loved; just as we need to learn to love, we need to learn to be loved. Likewise with caring, we need to learn to care, and we need to learn to be cared for, especially in a society in which trust in others is pathologized as weakness. Disease forces this recognition upon even the most recalcitrant egoist and impresses upon them the social nature of human individuality. Sickness intensifies consciousness of the self, as the reference to Donne above noted. This intensified consciousness of self is fear

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of the self’s destruction by the disease agent. Fear causes us to seek treatment, and treatment requires the formation of caring relationships. In other words, the most intense attachment to self (the demand that it be preserved against disease threats) directly connects us to other people in whom we must place our trust if we are to be cured. The general lesson the therapeutic and caring relationships in salutogenic health care teach us is that human interdependence is an occasion for the expression of the irreplaceable value of mutual openness – to the pain the one caring seeks to cure, and to the good intentions of the carer in whom the one being cared for must trust. Freed from the disease context, this structure of mutual openness prefigures a different model of human relationship in which the primary values are offering and accepting what is needed and repaying what has been taken. As Martha Albertson Fineman’s pathbreaking study of dependency and the non-alienated work it requires argues, “dependency is universal and inevitable – the experience of everyone in society and, for that reason, of collective concern, requiring collective response. However, the essential and society preserving work inevitable dependency demands has been channeled by society in such a way as to make only some of its members bear the burdens of the work.”33 Society could not survive without this work, yet its essential life-preserving value is ignored by the money-value system. This model of caring for dependent others is hidden in the home and imposed largely on women in a sexist division of labour because passivity, dependence, caring, and being cared for are not recognized as values by the money-value system. It valorizes taking the most of what is there to be taken as the supreme good, and giving back the least possible as (at best) a necessary evil. Accepting our liability to disease teaches us what we really are: finite natural and social beings whose life cannot be made good through sheer self-exertion, but requires caring for others and being cared for by them. As the American poet Mary Sarton, reflecting upon a life in which numerous diseases forced her to rely upon the care of her friends, remarked, “here’s the good thing … I’ve certainly become much more passive.”34 She does not mean that she became an inert object, but rather more receptive to and understanding of the necessity of the caring

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relationships which even the most solitary of people cannot live entirely without.

4.4 Old Age Embodied life, as Lynne Segal reminds us in her essay on aging, is not a game: “‘Experience consists of experiencing that which one does not wish to experience’ [wrote] Freud. It is a form of imaginative impoverishment to refuse to accept the tragic.”35 Like liability to disease, aging and the loss of power to express and enjoy our organic life capacities it eventually causes are regarded by both pessimists and technotopians as a negation of life-value. I will argue that the unique challenges that it poses bring with them unique forms of life-value. The “naturalness” of aging means that it is the human form of what happens to all things: they change as they become more temporally distant from their point of origin. We must conclude either that time itself is an imperfection at the heart of material being, as both Platonic idealists and technotopians do, or that there is nothing wrong and harmful per se about growing older. Assuming that one lives in a society that ensures adequate support for its aged citizens, old age should be a period of life to look forward to, in which, as Cephalus tells Socrates at the beginning of The Republic, the relaxation of the intensity of drives and desires “brings peace and freedom.”36 Aging, I will similarly argue, is good because it enables people to reflectively gather and unify the events of their lives into the ethical wholes we strive to create. Like the surrounding culture, both pessimists and technotopians assume that the appearance, priorities, and energy levels of youth are normative for human life as a whole and find old age deficient in comparison. From my perspective, no particular moment in the life cycle of human beings is normative for any other but all have their challenges and goods. As a natural process, aging is not bad, but rather the necessary terminus of any ongoing life. Like any destination, it gives coherence to the journey. As Scheffler argues, “the fact that life is understood as having stages is … a universal response to

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the realities of our organic existence and our physical birth, maturation, deterioration, and death. Our collective understanding of the range of goods, activities, and pursuits that are available to a person, the challenges he faces, and the satisfactions he may reasonably hope for are all internal to these stages. The very fact that the accomplishments and the satisfactions of each stage count as accomplishments and satisfactions depends on their association with the stage in question.”37 That which is valuable because it is novel at twenty years of age does not retain the same value (because no longer novel) at sixty, and sixty-year-olds who continue to live as twenty-year-olds become tedious and embarrassing. There are still pleasures to later ages, but they must differ from the pleasures of youth, because one has become a different person through the course of the experiences and activities that have defined one’s life. This conclusion can be generalized to growing old as such. Growing old is not, in and of itself, a loss of life-value, but an opening into new possibilities of life-value proper to that point in life. The entire arc of individual life creates possibilities for new and qualitatively different forms of valuable experience and activity, assuming that the full range of life-requirements continue to be met in forms appropriate to the concrete demands of the aging body. Life is not a linear accumulation of pleasures and pains, but a series of qualitative transformations that close off some possibilities for valuable experience and activity but also open others, until death ends all possibility of further experience of any sort. Christine Overall makes this point clearly: “Human life is valuable to its possessors because it affords the ongoing opportunity for activities and experiences, and, in the absence of debilitating pain or total loss of consciousness, that opportunity exists at every age.”38 That which most threatens the life-value of old age also threatens the life-value of any age: violence, oppression, irrational hatred and fear, poverty, and, in general, a ruling value system that subordinates the comprehensive satisfaction of the life-requirements of each and all to its own reproduction. These are the extrinsic impediments to life-value enjoyment that social movements struggle against. They must be distinguished from the intrinsic constitutive conditions of being a biosocial human being. The latter frame the sorts of life-value it is possible for us to produce and

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enjoy. Aging causes an organic decline, true, but it is an intrinsic constitutive condition of being human and living a good life. Properly furnished with that which they need (including, especially, real caring human interaction and friendship), aging people can continue to express and enjoy the life-value proper to this moment in the human life cycle. It thus follows that the best life would not be one arrested in youth, but one which continues through each natural stage of life, discovering in each and all qualitatively new ways of expressing and enjoying life-value. Life arrested in youth would lack transition towards the qualitatively new experiences and activities older age makes possible. Good lives are not simply lives in which pleasure is added to pleasure; they require growth, maturation, development of insight, understanding, and reflective wisdom. I do not mean that old age must be sedentary, but rather governed with greater reflective intelligence than earlier on, when reflective intelligence was not possible, because the experiences from which it derives had not yet been had. As all indigenous cultures that turn to elders for governance understand, a life that moves through different organic-cultural stages contains more life-value than a youthful life unending, because youthful life unending would be permanently closed off to the cumulative depth of existential and ethical understanding aging enables. Old age is a period of slowing down, reduction in strength and in sensory and mental acuity, but these facts can be taken as challenges to find new forms of non-alienated work to meet them. The valorization of youth against old age has informed legends and today inspires the research program of scientific gerontologists like de Grey, whose work to overcome aging was mentioned in chapter 2. If perpetual youth were somehow achieved, the result would not be an absolute increase in the amount of life-value, but rather the restriction of the expressed forms of life-value to those proper to one moment of the human cycle of life. The seekers after the fountain of youth assume not only that old age is miserable, but that old people too are essentially unhappy with being old as such (and not because they are impoverished, or ignored, or looked upon with horror by younger members of society). This assumption ignores the possibility, thoughtfully noted by Singer, that “in each phase of life

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we feel the plenitude in being what we are at that particular time.”39 If the ruling value system prioritizes the satisfaction of life-requirements across the entire spectrum of the human life span, there is no reason at all why the elderly cannot enjoy their lives as elderly. Looked upon as a stage of life to be lived and not a living death to be avoided, old age expresses forms of life-value not available to the young. While older people can still learn, write, teach, travel, desire, love, build, and forge friendships, young people (unless they have been diagnosed with a terminal illness and have become, in a sense, prematurely old) cannot reflect and gather the events, achievements, and failures of their life into an ethical whole. Unifying one’s life through evaluative reflection is a capacity unique to those who have lived a long time. By that point, as Segal argues, “we are no longer the people we once were, there is real loss and usually something for us to mourn; and yet, when contexts allow it, the residues of those former selves may not only be expressed, but can sometimes be seen and affirmed by others. In our minds, the whole history of our attachments, the shifting sense we have of ourselves over a lifetime, accompanies the external losses of ageing. The past returns, never exactly as it was, but also never truly lost.”40 Aging, lived properly, is a work of unifying, deepening, and doubling in memory the lifevalue already experienced. By “deepening” I mean that aging allows us to do better and value more that which we have learned and valued at earlier periods. The twofold condition of this deepening is implicit in Segal’s analysis: the life-experience that the development of a complex self requires, and the experience of loss necessary to teach us that which is most valuable in human life (the caring relationships we formed over time). As we live longer we can (other things being equal) do more. As we do more, we unfold, for ourselves and others, different aspects of our personality. At different moments in our life history different aspects of what becomes our complex, multilayered self preponderate. While continuing to actively express different, perhaps even new, aspects of the self, attaining an advanced age (phenomenologically considered, having multi-faceted experiences to draw upon in memory) allows us to try and create some unity out of these many layers. The Delphic oracle’s injunction to “know thyself” can only really be satisfied

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towards the end of life. Only those who can see death looming have the knowledge required to answer the question of who they really were. In a youthful Eden, Wallace Stevens notes profoundly, fruit would never ripen: “Is there no change of death in paradise? Does ripe fruit never fall?”41 If the ripe fruit never falls, there can be no renewal of life, since fruit is protection for the seed from which new life grows. The idea of fruit that never ripens is a self-contradiction, just like a life than never grows old. Knowledge of who we really were, of our character, our principles and whether we were able to live up to them is amongst the most essential goods of the life of a social self-conscious being. If old age is a material condition of developing that knowledge, then it follows that growing old is a good proper to human life. The older we get, the closer death is, the more we are able to reflect upon how we have lived our lives and answer the question of who we proved ourselves to be. Alongside the reflective unification of our life-experience in an answer to the question “Who am I?,” aging also enables us to revalue in memory people and things we once valued directly in experience. Memory presupposes the absence of that which was once present, and absence, especially of that which one loved and valued, involves pain. At the same time, the pain one feels in the immediate aftermath of loss does not negate the possibility of also feeling joy at the memory of that which it was painful to lose. Part of the wisdom of age is learning how to feel sorrow and joy at once: sorrow at losing that which was loved; joy at having loved it and being able to recall it in memory. Memory is thus a capacity for doubling the goodness of good experiences. Memory is not simply a passive reflection of what has been but is no longer, and its pleasures not reducible to sentimental nostalgia. It is an active revaluation of the past and therefore a form of non-alienated work which produces its own proper lifevalue. Its life-value is distinct from the life-value of the experience or relationship it recalls. A life rich in relationships and experiences and memories of completed relationships and experiences is thus doubly life-valuable. One cannot understand what good human lives are by abstracting momentary feelings of pleasure from the demands of life as a vulnerable material body, because life-valuable human goods are the

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result of non-alienated work upon the world and the self that our embodied finitude spurs us to perform. If we no longer had to undertake non-alienated labour, there would be nothing meaningful for us to do. Even liability to disease and organic decline, cases that both pessimists and technotopians regard as emblematic of the misery of embodied existence, now appear to be occasions for non-alienated work through which irreplaceable life value is produced. Liability to disease is a cause for the work of caring solidarity, expressed towards either individual loved ones or anonymous strangers, which, to repeat Camus’s words, “helps a man rise above himself.” Individually, liability to disease puts us in touch with the passive, receptive side of human being and encourages us to undertake the psychic work upon ourselves that our capacity to trust and be cared for requires. Likewise, old age and the forms of organic decline that it entails are not negations of life-value, but opportunities to produce new forms not available to the young. The work of gathering, recollecting, and unifying the experiences of our lives allows us to know ourselves more fully and coherently in old age than we could have in youth, while the work of remembering and mourning is essentially a work of doubling the life-value of the initial experience. We cannot increase the value of human life by eliminating the non-alienated work through which life-value is produced. Games are valuable as fun that provides a momentary respite from the work of life-value production; making all of life a game would undermine the possibility of the non-alienated work that produces life-value. It would finally eliminate, rather than increase towards infinity, the experienced value of human life. In the next chapter I will examine the forms of non-alienated work that derive from our conscious choices of relationship and life-project to see how their value depends upon the risks of failure and loss.

chapter 5

Frames of Finitude and Non-alienated Labour II: Relationships, Life-Projects, and Risk All frames of finitude are interlinked in the spatiotemporal matrix of socially self-conscious human experience. They are not rigidly set apart from each other but intermingle, blend, and bleed into one another in a fluid structure of awareness that health can become illness, satiety starvation, youth old age, and life death. Nevertheless, for the sake of argumentative clarity, it makes sense to distinguish those frames of finitude which are natural, in the sense of unchosen, and those that depend upon the decisions that we make as socially selfconscious agents. We do not choose to get sick, but we do choose to make friends, risk love, and define a certain path through life. We could remain alone, unloved, and as inert as bare survival allows us to be. Typically, we do not choose to be alone and inactive, but to come out of ourselves in offers of friendship, love, and creative lifeprojects. These decisions carry the risk that we will be spurned, be rejected, or fail. While the pains of loss, rejection, and failure are as painful experiences as there are in life, they are also essential correlates of the value of acceptance, love, and success. The non-alienated labour that we undertake to make ourselves friendly, lovable, attractive, and successful would not be work if the positive outcome could be guaranteed, and the achievements would not be valuable if they were not the outcome of work. In this chapter I will explore the non-alienated labour it takes to forge intimate connections and undertake creative life-projects. I will argue that, as in the case of dependence on nature, liability to illness, and old age, challenges that look like oppressive extrinsic limitations on life-value are really intrinsic constraints without which the nonalienated labour, and the value it creates, would not exist. I will conclude

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by showing how non-alienated labour, considered as a whole, is the general process by which human beings overcome the egocentric conception of the human good by recognizing the ways in which good lives must make some contributions to other lives, now and in the open-ended future of the human project.

5.1 Interdependence with Other People The human world is material nature, other people, and the symbolic and institutional contexts in which we live together in interdependence. Like material nature, other human beings are materially independent of one’s ego and thus constitute limits on its ability to satisfy the desires that only mutualistic relationship to other people can satisfy. There is, however, a potential reciprocity and mutuality to human relationships that it is not possible to establish with (most of) material nature. Human beings need each other in ways that most things in material nature do not. Thus, whereas non-alienated work on the world, whether materially transformative or intellectual, is mostly concerned with learning how things work and how to use them in appropriate ways, to use other human beings as things is condemned in most systems of morality, including materialist ethics.1 The pull of egocentric desire impels us in the direction of selfish exploitation of others, but their material independence enables them to reject non-reciprocal, non-mutualistic forms of interaction. The experience of being checked in the satisfaction of egocentric desires encourages non-alienated work upon the self. Non-alienated work upon the self transforms it from a mere desire-machine to a socially self-conscious agent who desires only such relationships as are mutually life-valuable. The complexity of human society is a function of the multiple ways in which people must interact to satisfy their needs. People have family associations, friendships, and sexual relations that can take myriad forms; they forge intellectual connections, interact in team sports, cultural associations, and workplaces, and must act collectively in political contexts. I cannot provide a careful analysis of the forms of work upon the self that each type of life-valuable,

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mutualistic relationship enables. Instead, I will focus on the relationship between work upon the self and the life-value of our most intimate (and fraught) interactions as friends and lovers. I want to emphasize the way in which the value of the achievement of friendship, love, and mutualistic sexual relations depends upon the formation of a self that is worthy of friendship, lovable, and sexually attractive to materially independent others who could always refuse one’s offers and advances. Human life begins with the absolute dependence of the infant upon the mother, whatever networks of family and social support surround her, and nature. While dependence on the latter never disappears, dependence on the mother is gradually transformed, through the course of maturation, to self-consciously structured forms of interdependent interaction. Singer captures the importance for human relationships of the integral unity of natural and social elements in human beings: “We are animals, not just agents … to satisfy imperatives that are physiological and biological, we need each other and need to be needed. As our bodies are nourished by elements of the physical world … so too is our psyche replenished and fulfilled by the contacts with other people that we are able to appreciate and enjoy. These realities provide the causal conditions to which appraisal is attuned and without which bestowal could not develop or even originate.”2 There are three important elements to Singer’s claim that help explain my key point. First, all human relationships originate in a shared life-requirement for sustenance and nurture. Second, out of the recognition that this need is shared and that satisfying it is good emerges a properly human life-requirement to be valued by others as sustainers and nurturers of their life (Singer’s “need to be needed”). If this claim is true then it follows, third, that evaluations of the quality of relationships depend on whether each is giving to the other what the other needs (friendship, love, pleasure) and receiving what they need to receive (friendship, love, pleasure). Reciprocity is not an exchange for services rendered (as in a contract) but is a free bestowal of intimate aspects of each self. The value of friendship or love therefore depends upon the self’s capacity to work upon itself to fashion itself into the type of person whom others regard as friendly, lovable, and desirable.

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Marx provides one of the finest expressions of the relationship between non-alienated work on the self and mutually valuable and valued intimate social relationships. He concludes his unforgettable essay “The Power of Money in Bourgeois Society” with this challenge: “Assume man to be man and his relationship to the world to be a human one. Then you can exchange love only for love … Every one of your relations to man and to nature must be a specific expression, corresponding to the object of your … real individual life. If you love without evoking love in return … if, through a living expression of yourself … you do not make yourself a loved person, then your love is … a misfortune.”3 This passage is elevated beyond Feuerbachian romanticism by its argument that money is not only an economic instrument but also a social power that distorts character and intimate relationships. Money unburdens the rich person from having to undertake the non-alienated work upon themselves necessary to make themselves lovable, or influential, or worthy of others’ friendship. Where money is the primary social power, one can simply purchase relations with others, turning friendship, love, etc. into a contractual quid pro quo. Whatever one thinks about the morality of such relationships, they must ultimately prove psychologically unsatisfying, because nothing of the real individual self is freely given. Neither partner to such a relationship could satisfy the “need to be needed” as the real, specific, non-substitutable individual that they are. The psychological acuity of Marx’s argument is found in his understanding that the life-value of love, friendship, and sexual pleasure depends upon the self’s individuality being fashioned in such a way that others are willing to freely acknowledge it as friendly, lovable, and desirable. The need to be needed is related in the most intimate way possible to the qualities of the person we take ourselves to be. As Singer argues, “Love … [is] acceptance of another as he is in himself … By its mere definition it is a bestowing of value upon anyone … that matters to the lover. In talking about acceptance, I meant that this bestowal does not seek to alter another in ways that are alien to his or her inclinations and desires. Whatever they are … they constitute the other as that person happens to exist at any moment.”4 These characteristics are not found artifacts, are not the programmed

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function of genes, but the result of non-alienated work upon the self. People are both raw material and the capacity to shape that material in accordance with socially self-conscious goals that take others’ needs into account. We are born in definite circumstances with genetic predispositions towards a certain body type; we incorporate good and bad influences from our early relationships, but who we become depends as well on our self-creative activity. As Sartre argues, “Freedom is precisely the nothingness which is made to be at the heart of man and which forces human reality to make itself rather than to be … for human reality, to be is to choose oneself.”5 Our identity is never coincident with the organic elements which constitute our organism or even our present commitments and relationships. We are always capable of changing ourselves in response to changed goals. We are both clay and sculptor. The person we offer to others as potential friend or lover is thus the outcome of non-alienated work upon the given material of which we are composed. Still, the “nothingness” which enables us to transform ourselves is not absolute. The shapes we try to fashion ourselves into are deeply connected to our need to maintain connections with the natural world upon which we are dependent and to create ourselves in such ways that we can establish the variety of mutualistic relationships with others that we must forge if our lives are to be fully valued and valuable. Out of the nothingness – the capacity to transform ourselves – must ultimately emerge forms of selfhood that others can value, i.e., that are worthy of friendship, love, and desire. Nothing about our nature ensures that we will be successful (that is Sartre’s point), but everything about our social nature makes it necessary to try to establish mutualistic connections. The lack of any guaranteed success is not a flaw in our nature or the conditions of our existence, but the reason why this work on the self needs to be taken so seriously. Materially independent others can confirm us in the identity we have tried to build for ourselves (legitimizing our self-interpretation as a lovable, etc., person) or disconfirm it by confronting us with truths about ourselves that are painful to hear but that we must take to heart and change if we want to make ourselves lovable. But the possibility of devastating disconfirmation in rejection is essentially and irrevocably bound up with the conditions of free bestowal. Only

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freely bestowed affirmation of one’s lovability, i.e., acknowledgment that one has succeeded in the non-alienated labour of making oneself lovable, is fully satisfying, and only free, materially independent others can bestow it. Love is supremely valuable because to attain it we must convince an independent person – whom we love as the particular, non-replaceable person they are for us – to love us. To convince them to love us we must be willing to expose the most vulnerable aspects of our selves. The freedom to bestow is the freedom to withhold; the unsurpassed goodness of being accepted as a friend and desired as a lover could not exist without the threat of the catastrophe of being rejected. The goodness of love is thus proportional to the psychological risk one must take to make oneself lovable and the non-alienated labour it takes to maintain that lovability once it has been first attained. Badiou captures the essence of the matter: “Love is above all a connection that lasts. We could say that love is a tenacious adventure. The adventurous side is necessary, but equally so is the need for tenacity – to give up at the first hurdle, the first quarrel, is only to distort love. Real love is one that triumphs lastingly, sometimes painfully, over the hurdles erected by time, space, and the world.”6 The effort to make oneself lovable and to maintain that love against the challenges that the fluidity of human desire and the powerful distractions and difficulties in the world pose for a satisfying personal and interpersonal life is what the technotopians would relieve us of through bestowing on each the technical power to create any virtual partner we are capable of imagining. However, if the foregoing analysis is correct, it suggests that a being that could transform itself at will, a Proteus or Bostrom’s autopotent superintelligence, would not be universally lovable, but rather not lovable at all because it is no one. That is, such a being lacks a determinate identity that a lover could accept unconditionally. The superintelligence could presumably invent friends, companions, and lovers out of itself, but if it were a superintelligence, it would know that whatever companions it created for itself could not freely bestow their love and care, because they were instrumentally designed for that purpose. The perfect insight into its own capacity to create that defines it as a superintelligence would immediately destroy the illusion of love should it try to create such a fiction. Or, it

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could live without love, in which case it would hardly be the realization of the technotopian’s goal – the freeing of human pleasures from the constraints of biological finitude. A superintelligence might not need love and friendship, but human beings do, and it is difficult to imagine anyone actually regarding as a goal worth pursuing for human reasons a solitary existence calculating pi to infinity. If the whole point of transhumanism was to intensify and expand the goods of human life, then it must respect the limits, the need for relationships with materially and psychologically independent people, within which love, friendship, and sexual pleasure become goods. Accepting those limits means giving up the driving idea of the project – the transcendence of the flesh. The psychologist Sherry Turkle is a leading expert on humanmachine relationships. Her empirical researches confirm my philosophical reflections. She has discovered that people fantasize that relationships with predictable and programmed machines will be more satisfying than relationships with unpredictable human beings. One of her subjects, a sixty-four-year-old man who has had trouble forging relationships with women, expresses the fantasy clearly: “Wesley … hopes a robot … ‘could anticipate my cycles, never criticise me …. I’d want from a robot a lot of what I would want from a woman, but I think a robot would give me more … With a woman, there are her needs to consider.”7 If we read his words carefully, we can see why a robot will never be able to solve his problem. He believes that the robot can completely accept him for the person he is. He thinks the robot can love him, in Singer’s sense of unconditional acceptance. However, he ignores the crucial problem: the robot cannot freely give this acceptance, but only execute a routine. Once that fact becomes apparent, the illusion will collapse, and Wesley will be left as he is now, alone with the “cycles” he refuses to change. If he wants to be loved, then he needs to undertake the non-alienated work upon himself required to make himself lovable. No machine can help him in this struggle. The simulated love of machines is valueless because it is not the freely given response of a living person who affirms the lovability of the specific identity one has created through one’s own non-alienated labour. Real love is freely given and can be freely withdrawn. In a

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relationship with a robot that has been programmed to simulate affection there is no risk, because the robot is just executing a routine and is completely unconscious of the other person as a social being with needs for mutualistic relationship. As Turkle concludes: “the first thing missing if you take a robot as a companion is alterity, the ability to see the world through the eyes of another. Without alterity, there can be no empathy … If they can give the appearance of aliveness and yet not disappoint, relational artifacts such as sociable robots open new possibilities for narcissistic experience,” but not, therefore, any experience of real sociality, friendship, or love.8 Those values requires materially independent others relating themselves to you. The robot cannot give real people what they need from others because the robot is not alive and cannot have any of the experiences required to understand what it is like to “need to be needed.” Turkle explains that “to understand desire, one needs language and flesh … [to have] these conversations, we must have a person who knows, firsthand, what it means to be born, to have parents and a family … and to anticipate death. And of course … we are not in a position to let the virtual take us away from our stewardship of nature, the nature that doesn’t go away with a power outage.”9 She elaborates upon this critique of human-machine “relationships” in a follow-up volume to Alone Together. Her research for Reclaiming Conversation reinforced her conclusion that when people fantasize that a relationship with a machine could be more satisfying than a relationship with a human, they are not so much adventurously transgressing a boundary as revising downward what they demand of a relationship. These fantasies say a lot about our cultural moment. Missing in all of them is the notion that, in psychotherapy, conversation cures because of the relationship with the therapist. In that encounter, what therapist and patient share is that they both live human lives. All of us were once children, small and dependent. We all grow up and face decisions about intimacy, generativity, work, and life purpose. We face losses. We consider our mortality … When we run into trouble with these things – and that kind of

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trouble is a natural part of every life – that is something a human being would know how to talk to us about.10 But not a machine, which was never born, cannot feel anything, and does not confront mortality. Yet – as with all other manner of gadgetry that stocks store shelves – people are willing to substitute machines for the real thing. As with other fantasies of consumer capitalism, the reality will prove disappointing, but not before the money has been made and the advertisers move on to the next miracle of deliverance from the struggles of non-alienated labour, distracting us from the truth that it is only through those struggles that such happiness as there is in human life is achieved. Thus, the life-value of the goods produced by non-alienated work on the self lies in achievements that presuppose and require social worlds of materially independent people. The supreme importance of these goods in a valuable and valued human life derives from the difficulty of the non-alienated labour these limits demand of us. Success thus demands careful attention at all moments to the implications of what we do. The pleasures of success cannot be separated from the struggle against uncertainty and the possibility of failure. They can also not escape from the impermanence of life and the terrible pains of loss.

5.2 Liability to Loss of Loved Ones and Friends Human life is dynamic – people move between countries, they fall out with friends, they alter their commitments, lovers die. Because life is dynamic and finite, all human beings are liable to the experience of some form of tragic loss. The pain of loss was central to the pessimistic arguments examined in the first chapter. It has been a perennial subject of poetry and philosophy because, almost as much as one’s own death, one fears the loss of those whom one loves. Yet, one cannot love without bearing the burden of possible loss. Of all the schools of Western philosophical thought, the Stoics focused most closely on the inevitability of loss. Marcus Aurelius explains the Stoic attitude towards loss by considering the case of the

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looming death of a child. He contrasts the prayers of two parents. The first prays that they not lose their son; the second, accepting the material possibility that the son may die, prays “not to be afraid to lose him.”11 The Stoic attitude might appear monstrous, a sign that the second parent does not really love their son but only their own emotional equilibrium which they do not want disturbed. Natural as this interpretation might be, there are other possible readings. Preparing oneself to bear the loss of a loved one is not necessarily a sign of intolerable coldness towards life, for, as Seneca argues, “the things that seem evils are not really so … those things that you call hardships, which you call adversities and accursed, are, in the first place, for the good of the persons themselves to whom they come; in the second place, that they are good for the human family.”12 They are good not because they “toughen us up” in some clichéd, macho way. Rather, they force us to concentrate on the nature of the things we actually value in life: they are, all of them, unavoidably finite and mortal. Aurelius’s Stoic parent is therefore not monstrous, but philosophically attuned to the realities of life. “Loss is nothing else than change. But the universal nature delights in change, and in obedience to her all things are now done well … What then dost thou say? That all things have been and all things always will be bad, and that no power has ever been found in so many gods to rectify these things, but the world has been condemned to be bound in never-ceasing evil?”13 The power to see that the world is not evil just because it is dynamic is found in the power of the human intellect to understand the events that we regard as misfortunes unique to ourselves in a universal context. The loss of one’s child, though painful, is not a condemnation of the justice of the entire material and social universe. Philosophical reflection does not deny the deep emotional pain of loss, but it helps us ultimately survive it by helping each who undertakes it to see themselves and all of their intimate relations as part of a larger whole in which coming to be and passing away are necessary. If we accept life, we must accept death and loss along with it. If the parent can learn to put the looming loss of their son in this context, they will enable themselves to survive that loss without in any way dishonouring the value of the son.

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If they did not love the son, there would be no need for the parent to pray for the strength to let him go. Truly indifferent people are not devastated by any sort of loss because they do not care what happens. The parent does care what happens, but understands that nature does not work according to their preferences. When we demand that the entire universe serve our particular demands we will be devastated by losses because we will feel that nature is punishing us. In contrast, the philosophical person who works up to the understanding that death is an inevitability and loss brutally painful sees clearly the situation that confronts them and does their best to prepare for it. If they felt nothing for their son, there would be no need to prepare emotionally to bear his approaching death. Every caring relationship is, and ought to be, a risk, and materially rational people undertake the non-alienated work necessary to understand and accept this risk, both before it happens and after, in the terrible but beautiful work of mourning through which we overcome those losses once they have occurred. Preparation for loss is actually life-affirming – proof that we understand the real contexts in which loving relationships are formed between finite subjects. Good lives involve mutualistic relationship to others, but there are always (at least) two people involved, and one can always outlive the other(s). Love between people does not demand that each sacrifice their own personality and interests so completely that one cannot survive the loss of the other(s). To fully give oneself to loved ones does not mean that the one retains nothing for oneself, such that the death of loved ones is tantamount to one’s own death. Life-value is not increased if the loss of loved ones destroys the lover through grief as well. Endless grief is not proof of the purity of love, but rather the opposite – that the love was based on an illusion that the relationship could endure forever. Nothing endures forever, and we cannot love properly, as finite human beings, unless we reflect on the material implication of this truth. Relationships can be ended by the death of one of the lovers, but the life-value that the other saw in the deceased can only be honoured by carrying on and continuing to live. No one who loves wishes the destruction of the object of that love, but rather the opposite. “I have reason and

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I have convinced myself,” writes Spinoza, that “no Deity, nor anyone else, save the envious, takes pleasure in my infirmity and discomfort, nor sets down to my virtue the tears, sobs, fear, and the like.”14 No one save the envious desires to see another in emotional distress precisely because love for another is the desire for the well-being of the loved one(s). Hence no one could wish that one’s lover be destroyed by grief after one dies. The nature of love demands that the lover wish that the beloved continues to live fully. However, if the love was deep and genuine, the loss of the loved one will be, initially, devastating. No amount or intensity of philosophical preparation can prevent the shuddering tears and feelings of absolute loneliness that the death of a loved one produces. The non-alienated work it takes to resume living and form new relationships with new people, while not replacing those who have been lost (people are not fungible things that can simply be exchanged one for another), does create new life-value, for both the one recovering from the loss and the new people with whom they build new relationships (or deepen existing ones). Mourning is the non-alienated labour through which the grieving lover learns that life can be renewed because what was best about the dead lover has become part of one’s own self. Freud’s careful analysis reveals that mourning arises involuntarily and that its work cannot be accelerated. “It is … well worth notice that, although mourning involves grave departures from the normal attitude toward life, it never occurs to us to regard it as a pathological condition and to refer it to medical treatment. We rely on its being overcome after a certain lapse of time, and we look upon any interference with it as useless or even harmful.”15 The spontaneous emergence of mourning is proof that the things and people one loses in life were objectively valuable. If they were only of subjective value to us as fungible instruments of our own desires, then the natural reaction to loss would be a calculating search for a replacement, which is the very opposite goal of mourning. Mourning is the extraction through memory of all the life-value in the now lost loved one; it is not complete until the person feels whole again, and the person can feel whole again only once they fully understand what the now lost loved one meant to one’s own life. We grieve the loss of that

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which is irreplaceable. We are able to go on and love again when we learn, through the non-alienated work of mourning, that the irreplaceable aspects of the other we loved have become an integral part of what is best in us. Still, this argument is far from universally convincing. Exploring emotional responses to the death of loved ones, Dan Moller concludes that the human capacity to overcome loss is a sign that “evolution has endowed us with a deplorably superficial capacity for valuing things in general.”16 Moller argues that our capacity to overcome grief is morally lamentable but evolutionarily necessary. If grief were so powerful that fear of experiencing it caused people to stop reproducing, or if suffering it were so overpowering as to prevent people from returning to any sort of productive endeavour, then the species could literally die out from grief. Perhaps Moller pushes the argument too far here, or perhaps, from a one-sided naturalistic perspective, he is correct. In either case, his argument misses the lifevalue expressed in the grief we do in fact feel, and the life-value we create when through the non-alienated work of mourning we discover that the best of the loved one has been integrated into our own personality. We thereby learn to build new relationships without denying the life-value of the ones we have lost. Contra Moller, our capacity to work beyond grief through mourning is not a sign of superficial valuations. Superficial valuations are functions of superficial ruling social value systems. If the value of people is reduced to their instrumental value to us (including as adornments which increase our standing in others’ eyes), it is not because we are evolutionarily incapable of deep attachment, but because the ruling value system encourages us to think of all things as exchangeable without loss for other things. If, by contrast, we, as materially rational, socially self-conscious agents, value others as irreplaceable centres of socially self-conscious experience and activity, unique individuals for whom we care and whom we love as the specific, irreplaceable persons they are, we can value them deeply, as deeply as we value ourselves, and still recover from their loss without becoming indifferent monsters. Although the concrete peculiarities and specificities of the people and things we actively value are irreplaceable, our capacity to value does not die out with their loss.

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Working through the sadness that the loss of genuinely life-valuable relationships causes both permanently integrates the value of that which we have lost into our own life history and enables us to search anew for novel, perhaps even qualitatively different, relationships. If we did not feel real pain at the loss of people we loved, then that would be proof that they were not objects of real value to us. At the same time, if we cease to value in the face of loss, our own lives have ceased to be a subject of value for us. However, if we have fully integrated the life-value of the one we have lost into our own self through mourning, we free ourselves from grief to love again. My point is again nicely illustrated in Lynne Segal’s reflections on aging. Discussing the changing nature of desire in older people, she tells stories of aging women (including herself) who late in life, having lost their husbands, discover (or rediscover) desires for new intimate relationships with women. The transition she experienced essentially involved the sadness of losing her old relationship (and part of her old self), but also the painful joy of growth in directions her old life had closed off: “Looking around my own aging feminist milieu, I can see that I am far from the only older woman who has enjoyed and, in my case, celebrated the delights of a heterosexual partnership that ended in her late fifties, who has subsequently found unexpected erotic pleasure in a relationship with a woman.”17 Nowhere does Segal (or the other women she discusses) admit to any superficiality in her feelings towards her heterosexual partner. The love and the loss of love for him were real, but so too is the goodness of the qualitatively new life-value the same-sex relationship allows her to realize. Moller is thus wrong to see in our recovery from mourning a sign of the superficiality of attachment. If our attachments were really superficial, we would, as I said above, not mourn, but set about immediately finding replacement parts for our lives. We do not normally do so without a period of mourning. At the same time, we do normally recover, which does not prove that we valued our lovers lightly, but rather that we too, as well as the enduring world of things and people, remain subjects and objects of value worthy of care and concern right up until the moment of death. Being a material being means living in time with others. Living in time with others means that relationships will change, and will (if

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they last long enough) be severed by death. When people undertake the non-alienated labour of building any kind of lasting relationship, they commit themselves to living with the risk that they could outlive it. Accepting the risk does not mean that they learn to love as a finite person. While we might project unending futures for those whom we value, they do not become immortal just because we wish they could be. If we cannot accept the potential loss of loved ones, then we cannot love. If we cannot love, we cannot be loved. If we cannot be loved, we deprive ourselves of experiencing one of the surest signs of the objective reality of the value of our lives – that others judge us worthy of their love. In the effort to protect ourselves from the pain of loss, we make our lives worse in the process for, as the great Canadian novelist Alistair MacLeod wrote, “all of us are better when we are loved.”18 “Better” here means more fully expressive of the capacity to love and be loved in turn. Spinoza makes essentially the same point in The Ethics: “If anyone conceives that he has been loved by another … He will love that other in return,” and both will become more exuberantly alive through this mutual affirmation.19 If we are afraid to love because love cannot last forever, then not only must we forgo intense and mutually affirming personal relationships, we will also have to cut ourselves off from all people and, indeed, all things to which we can form attachments because nothing is eternal. Cutting ourselves off from all attachment to people and things would mean denying ourselves opportunities for the caring, nurturing, soothing work that the health of people and the physical and aesthetic integrity of things require. Adopted as a universal attitude, general indifference and neglect would soon cause the collapse of the social infrastructure and collective life-capital that human development depends upon, because if we are really going to contribute back to the stores of life-capital from which we have drawn, we must care about the others who need our contribution. The collapse of that social infrastructure and life-capital base would eventually destroy the entire artistic, intellectual, and scientific heritage of humanity. The strength to bear the truth that all things and people we care about can be lost is not only an abstractly individual virtue, it is a social and political virtue as well. By accepting the fragility of the historic achievements of the species in building structures, institutions, artifacts, and forms

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of relationships that satisfy our physical and sociocultural liferequirements, we make ourselves better able to protect and preserve them, and to extend their reach to those who are still deprived of the life-value they contain. Ultimately, important losses are losses of that which is life-valuable, and that which is life-valuable either satisfies a life-requirement or expresses a life-capacity in a life-coherent way. Attentiveness to the ever-present liability to loss is not a morbid fixation on that which is wrong with life and in need of re-engineering, but rather non-alienated work through which we enable ourselves to continue to care, love, and value even as we bear the pain of the losses our lives will involve. No matter how deeply people, individually or collectively, care, lifevaluable things and relationships will be lost. However, as I have argued, loss does not mean that recovery and renewed development are not possible. Reopening to subjective and objective life-value is not, of course, easy. None of the forms of non-alienated work that I am describing in this chapter are easy or conflict-free. Their difficulty is the sign of their importance in the creation of life-value. All stir up contradictory emotions and force us to struggle between poles that can never be fully reconciled: the desire for independence and the need to share life with others, the projection of good experiences as if they could last forever and the knowledge that they cannot, the desire for emotional security and the drive for novelty. It takes strength of character to confront and overcome the difficulties and struggles these forms of work demand because there is never any certainty that the outcome of the struggles will be successful. The same truth holds in regard to those creative life-projects that we undertake as essential elements of our public identity. The more challenging these projects are, the more likely failure is too, but without the possibility of failure, the value of actually achieving something worthwhile would be impossible.

5.3 Creativity and Liability to Failure Our lives are shaped by the different projects we strive to realize. Our happiness and public identity depend to a great extent on the successful realization of these projects. However, since the realization of

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any project involves working with and upon materially independent objects and other people, and because our capacities for understanding, making, relating, and influencing are imperfect and limited, any project can fail, at any time, for any number of reasons. On first glance failure appears to negate life-value. Life-value seems to be concentrated in the end, in the realization of the goal. Objective failure to realize the project would seem to entail subjective failure to realize the life-value of the non-alienated labour of self-realization. Yet, as everyone knows who has tried, few projects of any complexity or difficulty succeed on the first effort. The more challenging, difficult, and potentially life-valuable a project, the more opportunities for setback and failure it will involve. This type of non-alienated work always unfolds through a dialectic of failure and renewed effort. If even trivial projects like learning to ride a bicycle involve recovering the courage to ride after knee-scraping (maybe even arm-breaking) failures, how much more does this dialectic operate across an entire life? One’s “life work” is a constant struggle against the inevitable failures caused by our imperfect selfunderstanding, the limitations of our talents, and the material independence of the objects and people upon which and with which we work. Failure is thus not an absolute negation of the life-value of our projects, but an impediment integrally connected to their realization. Failures and setbacks reveal to the attentive person depths and complexities not initially apparent in the originating idea but which must be accounted for if the project is to eventually succeed. Once understood as such, objective checks to the immediate realization of our subjective projects are occasions for learning what it really is that we are struggling to do. The full content of the ideas that guide our life-valuable projects only becomes apparent when their objective realization is stymied by unforeseen difficulties of realizing them in the objective world. There are two general forms of objective limitation that projects of self-realization typically encounter. The first are extrinsic to the nature of the project itself and involve securing access to the material means the project requires. In a money-value economy, little can be done without access to the money to pay for the commodified materials one will require in order to carry out one’s project. Artists must

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buy materials, scholars must have access to books, poets must be able to pay the rent, scientists need laboratories, vintage car restorers must be able to buy parts, and anyone, regardless of their project, must, if they rely upon alienated labour for the funds they require, find sufficient time outside of paid employment to conceptualize and struggle to realize the project.20 These extrinsic barriers constitute, in general, the objects of social and political struggle against the reified economic forces that are responsible for alienated labour in general. These extrinsic limits and these struggles are not the primary focus of my analysis here. Instead, I am interested in the intrinsic barriers to self-realization that would still remain even after all extrinsic limitations have been overcome. Let us assume that all extrinsic limitations have been overcome through successful social struggles. That would not mean that the conceptualization of a project would become identical to its realization, that in a fully free society anything we could conceive that was physically possible would easily be accomplished. It would still be the case (perhaps more so, since there would be no extrinsic barriers to blame for failure) that we would confront intrinsic barriers to the adequate realization of our plans. There are two general types of intrinsic limitation. The first is universal: the limitations that our dependence on an objective world of nature and other people impose on that which it is life-valuable to actually create. The second is unique to each individual: the limitations of our talents that define us as the particular people that we are. While the intrinsic limitations ultimately concern the limits of our own ability to conceptualize and transform matter into an adequate expression of our ideas, they must always respect a more basic limitation that the very nature of the material world imposes upon all of us. The human capacity for thought and creation is not limited by any material barrier, but our life-requirements tie us to the material world and other people in ways that do indeed constrain our creative practices. While it might appear that our need for nature and other people is an extrinsic constraint on our powers of imagination and creation, the truth is that our never-relenting need for both is an intrinsic constraint that helps explain how our imagination first evolved, and a motivation to express our generic creative

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capacities in ways that uniquely contribute to life-support, development, and enrichment. The human imagination is a natural capacity (the product of the evolution of human brains and the cultures socially interacting brains have created) to transform the very nature out of which it developed. The entire field of human intentionality grows out of our need to sustain ourselves in a world that does not come with an instruction manual. As the psychoanalyst Arnold H. Modell argues in his critique of informational models of thought and imagination, “intentionality is implicitly an ecological concept in that action in the environment alters that environment, and in turn the environment alters the self. Intentionality … can be thought of as a value-driven selection directed towards some future goal. Intentionality therefore includes the self, emotions, and the anticipation of the future, a form of imagination.”21 Intentionality, imagination, and the entire open field of creative work they enable cannot be understood as mere “information processing.” Our initial and abiding intentional orientations in environmental space and life time are directed towards survival and development, but their higher realization takes the form of socially and symbolically meaningful creations that cannot be understood as mere data sets but are necessarily and essentially meaningful wholes. Once again, therefore, Kurzweil and other technotopians are wrong to regard the “life-support” functions of the brain as wasted information-processing capacity. Creative imagination depends upon the embodied needs which, when understood as giving direction to our lives, elevate their satisfaction into meaningful events (as opposed to sheer biological necessities). Anthony Storr, another psychoanalyst, elaborates on this crucial point. Our survival in complex environments, Storr argues, “cannot be ensured unless intelligence and imagination take over from innate patterns in making provision for basic needs. But the price of flexibility, of being released from the tyranny of rigid, inbuilt patterns of behaviour, is that ‘happiness,’ in the sense of perfect adaptation to an environment or complete fulfillment of needs, is only briefly experienced.”22 Our imagination helps us to model possibility sets, which our decisions and actions then help determine. But in the process of modelling these environmental possibilities, the environment and our own selves are changed, creating

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new capacities, new challenges, new possibilities for higher forms of satisfaction, a doubling of the material reality of the need into its beautiful re-creation: the beauty of the painting of the hunt in addition to the hunt itself. However, the doubling of reality in imagination and the creative projects it makes possible also mean new forms of failure become possible: the painted image fails to give expression to the imagined work, or the community rejects it as ugly. The happiness that success causes cannot be separated from the pain of possible failure. This point brings us to the second form of intrinsic limitation to the adequate realization of our creative capacities, the initial superficiality of our initial understanding of the effort it will take to find the form that gives adequate expression of our idea. If one is to find the form adequate to the idea, one must be willing to engage in a struggle with oneself, with one’s intellectual and practical capacities, and with the medium in which one seeks to realize that idea. “Ever tried, ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better,” writes Beckett.23 “I begin every painting,” the great American abstract expressionist painter (and former philosophy student) Robert Motherwell adds in a similar vein, “by painting a series of mistakes. The painting comes out of the correction of the mistakes by feeling.”24 All non-alienated work is a struggle to give material shape to the imagination. In the case of scientific theories or mathematical theorems, the material is the conceptual language through which the thought is given rigorous form. Artistic creation is the paradigm of non-alienated work because it involves invention of the rules of composition as well as the content. That is why the threat of failure is most pervasive in art. Artistic practice is always a working out of ideas in media that have their own density and solidity, that resist the forms the artist struggles to impose upon them. The mistake or the failure is essential to this working-out process. The final achievement, as Motherwell notes, is the result of correcting the initial mistakes, or overcoming the inadequacies of the first attempts to find the right approach to the material of composition. But as Beckett reminds us, the final achievement is never a fully realized expression of the initiating idea. If these sorts of hurdles were one day eliminated from the pro-

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cess of creation, it would not result in “more numinously beautiful work,” as Pearce naively assumed; it would destroy the making of art. The life-value of non-alienated work lies not only in its results for others, but, for the self who undertakes it, also in the struggle to find the rules that will allow successful realization of the project. The technotopians promised the evolution of superintelligences for whom failure would be impossible because the difference between idea and material embodiment had disappeared. Paul Virilio teases out the underlying idea that motivated the technotopians in this regard: “That nothing happen, any more, anywhere, ever, unless we say so.”25 Virilio regards this slogan as a war against Chance, a war against the unforeseen or unplanned, whether it emanates from without, from a nature we do not fully understand, or, more importantly for present purposes, from within, from the opacity with which our own guiding ideas are initially shrouded. Consider again in this regard the testimony of real artists as to the reasons why failure is essential to the creative process. Motherwell again: Most people innocently think that a painter or a musician or a poet has an experience, and goes and writes it down, or paints it down. That is not at all what happens. What the poem or the painting or the piece of music is, in an experienced person working with a medium, and what turns out to be the poem or the piece of music or the picture, as worked out in the medium, is not illustration or journalism or having a dream experience and then putting it down. Art is a triangle … composed of oneself, the medium, and human culture … In painting or music or poetry one is concerned with how a very specific medium functions, and, paradoxically, in how it is functioning, the whole human soul is revealed.26 Missing from the naive technotopian view of artistic creation is recognition of the way in which the materiality of the medium resists the artist’s imagination. This resistance forces the artist (or, by extension, any creatively active subject) back to the idea itself, to reflectively explore exactly what it was about that idea that she wanted to

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explicate or express. Creation is necessarily a back-and-forth movement – from the idea to the medium and from the medium back to the idea. The creative subject cannot know beforehand what intrinsic limits the medium and their own powers of imagination will put in the way of full expression of the originating idea. One must discover in each case the rules that will transform the given medium in a way adequate to the imagined work (which itself changes as the struggle to give the rule to the medium develops). One of the defining characteristics of non-alienated labour is that the rules of non-alienated work are immanent to the work and must be discovered through the process of working the idea out. There is no boss to command behaviour and there are no written instructions to follow. Anyone can fill in a paint-by-numbers picture; almost no one can make art with lasting aesthetic value. Non-alienated labour is not untrammelled selfexpression; it is discovering in the process of doing the intrinsic constraints on self-expression that allow it to achieve its freely conceived end. As Goethe says of the process of artistic creation, “so too all forming culture needs some tether: / Unbridled spirits end in vain disaster / Pursuing pure perfection’s elevation. / Who wants great things must get himself together; / Constraint is where you show you are a master.”27 There are rules to creative non-alienated labour, therefore, but these rules must be discovered in the process of creating. Kant’s conception of genius captures the point I am making well. Genius, he argues, “is a talent for producing that for which no definite rule can be given: and not an aptitude in the way of cleverness for what can be learned according to some rule.”28 Not every fully realized expression of the defining human capacity to realize our ideas in material reality is a work of genius. Nevertheless, all genuine creative projects have something in common with genius: they reveal to the subject their own limitations as creative subjects which must be both accepted and overcome in a dialectic that ceases only when creative activity ceases. As soon as there is no confrontation with intrinsic limits, there is no longer creation, but only following conventional rules or typecast repetition of formulae found to have worked in the past. All non-alienated creative work, since it pushes individuals to go beyond forms that have already been expressed, involves experiment

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and invention. As necessary excursions into the unknown, all experiments and inventions risk failure. While in colloquial language failure is the opposite of success, the truth, in creative practice, is that where there is no initial failure there is no genuine creation. Creation – artistic, scientific, political – is the painful struggle to surpass established limits, first in imagination, and then in the chosen medium in which the imagined object is to be realized. Its aim is always to contribute something of unique life-value to the world. The dialectic of confrontation and surpassing of limits also enables individuals to create themselves as unique. “Unique” here does not mean eccentric to the point of inscrutability, but expressive of the highest powers of creative self-externalization of which one is capable as this specific person. The struggle to make oneself unique always occurs within a social field of life-development. The more that the society enables each person to access the resources their life requires, the more the extrinsic barriers to self-realization are overcome. The more that the extrinsic barriers to self-realization are overcome, the more that society enables every person who lives within it to undertake the struggles with themselves that the non-alienated labour of self-creation requires. However, no one who would create themselves as a unique individual can be unburdened of that inner struggle. One might even say that the life-value of overcoming the extrinsic barriers to selfrealization is that it frees intellectual energy and time to engage in the ever-renewed struggle against the self’s intrinsic limitations. Freeing those energies is never the same as freeing the process of creation from the possibility of failure. As I argued above, creation is the ongoing dialectic of confronting and surpassing the limitations of one’s capacity to give adequate material shape to an idea. There is also an existential dimension to the role that failure plays in the process of creation. “Failure,” in its existential signification, means that we can never give perfect expression to our own lives in particular, or human life as a whole. Life can be joyous, the exuberance of feeling the fullness of being present to simply experience the day, as I noted above, but this exuberance is always cut short. Yet, the knowledge that joy can never be absolutely complete does not undermine most human beings but is a powerful spur towards the creation (and experience) of that art which we might call “beautiful.” Beautiful art,

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in this sense, is art that finds unique formal means to express the deepest fears, joys, and existential pains of human existence: ultimate origins and fate, birth and death, love and loss, aching desire for an object impossible to attain, sensuous pleasure and its inevitable decline, war and peace, fear and wonder.29 Even the most sentimental love poem unfolds against the unstated but ever-present possibility of loss of the lover. If those we loved were nothing more than figments of a virtual imagination, there would be no need to try bind the object to ourselves through poetry. There would be no need for elegies and requiems if no one ever died, and no need to try to terrify with tragedy if the possibility of fatal errors were banished forever. Our embodied finitude makes all of life a struggle against the possibility of catastrophic failure, and beautiful art gives creative expression to these struggles. The poet and critic Robert Peck captures the essential connection between art and the threat of existential failure that embodied finitude imposes on life. “Within every creation, Borges suggests, there is an essential emptiness. Perhaps this emptiness resembles the infinity of time that we imagine will follow after we die as individuals. We contain within us the emptiness of the idea of oblivion – it is what we are – and we know that we will return to this nothingness, the absence of ourselves, out of which we came. We seek [in art] to fill that nothingness.”30 If Peck and Borges are correct, were our lives absolute plena of joyful experience, if there were no emptiness to confront because we could give whatever form we wanted to ourselves without effort or struggle, then there would be nothing for which we need beautiful art to give voice. “If the world were clear,” Camus argued, “art would not exist.”31 Beautiful art is thus an ongoing struggle to create meaning in and through the aesthetic transformation of mortal problems that might otherwise cause only despair. As Elaine Scarry argues, “The habit of poets and ancient dreamers to project their own aliveness onto nonliving things suggests that it is the basic work of creation to bring about this very projection of aliveness.”32 When a poem projects aliveness onto inanimate or non-self-conscious nature it brings into the sphere of human values forces and elements that are, as merely

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physical, indifferent to human problems. Meaning creation through art turns raw matter into things that matter to us, and when things matter to us they justify the struggles and pains that finite life necessarily involves. In the deepest sense, artistic creation is a struggle to relocate our births and deaths from a meaningless cycle of genetic transmission to the transgenerational creation of a human world whose distinguishing feature is institutionalized care and concern for each. Of course, beautiful art does not tend to the organic and its needs directly; that which it nurtures is the emotional power necessary not only to endure the travails of mortal existence, but to learn to see the beauty in the tragedies of finite existence, to affirm in the face of their inevitable loss the irreplaceable value of things, experiences, feelings, and people. Peck again articulates this point clearly. Although he is speaking specifically of tragedy, I believe that his interpretation applies across the entire field of artistic creation. “For with our knowledge of their loss, we recognise the inevitability of our loss; and since to understand loss, to feel the weight of suffering through it, is also to understand that which has been lost, we recognise that through suffering of loss our affirmation of life is expressed and strengthened.”33 Since life is lived in time, every experience persists but for a moment; every feeling arises, intensifies, and dies out. Beautiful artistic creation is thus a metonym for the ways in which the meaning-creating capacity of human beings can confront and accept the tragedy that is life itself. Art as the product of non-alienated work is, as Marx said of all non-alienated work, “life-engendering life.”34 Life-engendering life means the creation of future life beyond the temporal horizons of the people who undertake the work in the present to engender it. Artistic beauty, therefore, like all life-valuable creation, is an affirmation of the value of a future that one will not be present to experience. As the Canadian painter John Brown argues, artistic creation is an “investment in the human future, in the idea that there will be one.”35 He means both that the profound struggle of the artist to create is justified by the faith that the world the artwork requires for its preservation will be maintained and that future generations will continue to see their own contemporary struggles reflected in the world of the

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past. In these transhistorical connections, beautiful art reveals the universal dimensions of the existential struggles of human beings and is an essential means of making them worthwhile. Artistic endeavour is essentially future-oriented in a second, more political sense as well. As the freest form of imaginative transformation of the given world, artistic creation testifies to the power of present human beings to create a different future for ourselves in which the only limitations that we confront will be the intrinsic limitations I have been discussing in this section. “The truth of art,” Marcuse argued, lies in its power “to break the monopoly of the established reality (i.e., of those who established it), to define what is real … Art is committed to that perception of the world which alienates people from their functional existence and performance in society – it is committed to an emancipation of sensibility, imagination, and reason in all spheres of subjectivity and objectivity.”36 Art is not the supersession of all limitations on human creative power. Rather, if Marcuse is correct, it exposes the difference between alienated and non-alienated forms of creation. On its own, it cannot radically transform the world, but it is objective evidence that human beings do not need to obey the rules that external authorities or reified social powers impose. In art, human beings discover a different type of rule – a rule immanent to the practices that instantiate them, and a value that extends beyond the artist. Every worthwhile creation is distinguished from the derivative by its being recognized as valuable in new eras and contexts. The affirmation of the value of art does not mean that it alone of all the forms of human creation is valuable across time and space. Art is different in not being – as most human creations are – anonymous. We do not know the names of most of the people whose labour helps sustain our lives and thus advances the future of the human project, but their anonymity does not mean that their contributions are not valuable and valued in use. Few are capable of masterworks, but the capacity to create a masterwork and the capacity to contribute in valuable and valued ways to the human project are not identical. The good of all non-alienated labour, even labour upon the self so that it becomes more lovable and friendly, extends beyond the narrow limits of the abstract individual ego. Properly understood,

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the individual good is always connected with relationships and makes contributions to the lives of others. Good human lives, therefore, are not only pleasurable for the self; they make of the self someone who has a positive effect on the lives of others, privately and publicly.

5.4 Life-Capital and the Future of the Human Project Pleasure is a feeling of self-affirmation – I feel good – but this self is not an abstract ego treating nature and society as mere means to its own exclusive ends. The self is a socially self-conscious agent who understands, accepts, and values the bonds of dependence that make it a member of nature and the links of mutualistic interdependence that make it a member of a society. A good life should be pleasurable, but at the same time, socially self-conscious people accept the constraint that materially rational pleasures must be life-coherent. Life-coherent pleasures do not unsustainably exploit the natural world or oppress other people but improve, strengthen, and enable others to live well through the contributions that non-alienated labour makes. In order to test the soundness of these claims, we need to concentrate on the way in which collective life-capital links the non-alienated work of presently existing selves to the good of new selves who will live in a future that does not contain the people who built it. Before turning explicitly to life-capital as the connective tissue linking individual non-alienated work to the future good of new selves, let us first consider the way thoughts of the future inform people’s understanding of their own present value. Samuel Scheffler has contributed an important exploration of this problem. Although he proceeds by way of thought experiment rather than concrete analysis of social action, his investigation uncovers limits to hedonistic egocentrism that support my overall conclusion. Scheffler’s Tanner Lectures on Human Values examine the role a conception of the afterlife – not a heavenly beyond but the material existence of other people on earth after one’s own death – plays in constituting the meaning that actually existing human beings find in their work. He discovers that egocentric hedonism perhaps plays a much smaller role in the determination of meaningful activity than the common sense

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of the ruling money-value system supposes. The egocentric-hedonistic assumptions about individual motivation that Scheffler’s argument contests are of old vintage. Bentham provides a paradigmatic expression when he maintains, in the quotation already cited in chapter 2, that the goodness of a person’s actions “depends upon such parts of his conduct as affect, immediately at least, the happiness of no one but himself.”37 In contrast, Scheffler demonstrates that goodness depends on meaning, and meaning depends on the existence of other people, now and in the future, who are the consciously intended beneficiaries of their actions. That is, the pleasures of an atomic ego are not sufficient to make activity meaningful and therefore worthy of the effort it requires. Agents must feel that they are making some important contribution to the lives of others, such that, if they were to know that the species would soon become extinct, meaningful action would cease. Why struggle to cure cancer (to use one of Scheffler’s examples) if soon no one will be alive to be possibly afflicted by it? He concludes that “the fact that we would have these reactions (to the knowledge that the species would soon die out) highlights a conservative dimension in our attitude towards what we value … In general, we want the people and things we care about to flourish; we are not indifferent to the destruction of that which matters most to us.”38 It follows that if we care about the conservation of the things and people that matter to us, we must care about the natural and social conditions in which those things can be conserved. Bringing to light the connection between valuation and the conservation of what is valued reveals, Scheffler suggests, that we value the ongoing future of the species more than our own individual existence. Egocentric hedonism, despite its ideological prevalence in liberal-capitalist society, misses the social dimensions of individual motivation. Take, for example, the act of lovingly bringing a child into the world. Anyone who lovingly brings a child into the world hopes that the child will have a good life. No one who intends a good life for the child can believe that the child’s value is reducible to an instrument of their parents’ joy. Moreover, intending the child’s good demands concern for the natural and social conditions in which the child lives, now and in the future, whether or not the parent(s) live(s) to see the

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whole of that child’s future. The child’s good exists as long as the child exists, and if one values the child, one values a life that is not one’s own, as well as the complex of formal and informal interconnections between lives – the systems of nature and society – that sustain the child’s life. Scheffler concludes that “people are often happy to pursue goals that they do not expect to be achieved until after their own deaths. What the doomsday scenario highlights, in other words, is the extent to which we regard projects as worth undertaking even when the successful completion of these projects is not expected to take place during our own lifetimes. What is significant is … our willingness to harness the resources of instrumental rationality to pursue goals whose achievement will only occur after we are gone.”39 Even instrumental rationality cannot be reduced solely to the calculation – blind to others’ needs and the shared life-interest – of the most efficient means to one’s exclusive ends, but also involves the materially rational consideration of the effects of one’s own projects on the lives of others, now and in the open-ended future. The projects that we regard as most individually valuable are those whose completion we will not see: the entire life of children, a multi-generational scientific research program, the realization of the goal of human freedom for each and all. Therefore, Scheffler concludes, we care not just about our own atomic pleasures, but about human life and its universal natural and social conditions. There cannot be human individuals without human societies, and there cannot be human societies without nature. “Individual valuing is … part of a social or collective enterprise … The entire range of phenomena that consists in people’s valuing things, in things mattering … occurs within the implicit framework of a set of assumptions that includes, at the most basic level, the assumption that human life itself matters, and that it is an ongoing phenomenon with a history that transcends the history of any individual.”40 Scheffler’s crucial insight is that the individual good is not bound in time and space to the living presence of the individual. In trying to live good lives we extend the self through its works beyond its own lifetime. His examples of people committing themselves to projects that cannot be fulfilled in their lifetimes but that form the substance of their lives effectively prove the importance of the future to the meaning we attach to our present life.

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A similar argument has been advanced by Susan Wolf. Like Scheffler, Wolf is concerned with resituating individual life stories within a broader context of connections to and relations with other people and the wider world. In Wolf’s view, meaning in life is produced when “subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness … from active engagements with projects of worth.”41 These projects are distinct from projects that we pursue for the sake of subjective happiness or from projects that we pursue for reasons of duty and morality. Rather, they are projects we pursue out of love: “the idea is that a person’s life can be meaningful only if she cares fairly deeply about some thing or things, only if she is gripped, excited, interested, engaged or, as I earlier put it, if she loves something – as opposed to being bored by or alienated from most or all of what she does.”42 The guiding idea is similar to that of Scheffler’s argument (and concurs with my own) on the crucial matter of the need to see the self and its good from the perspective of what it commits itself to and contributes to the world of nature and other people. Todd May too has understood the importance of finding forms of activity that go beyond the self and its pleasures as the basis of a meaningful life. For May what counts is being able to construct one’s life according to certain narrative values – intensity, steadfastness, curiosity – that elevate life beyond mere factual happenings in a silent and indifferent universe into a coherent whole that we value as significant and that is exemplary for others. “Narrative values concern the doing of living … the how of living.”43 To be sure, meaning depends in part upon how we devote ourselves to the project we devote ourselves to, and also (as I will argue in chapter 6) upon shaping our lives into an ethical whole. Where May’s argument differs significantly from my own is in his belief that the values served by a meaningful life are anchored in nothing but a web of self-constituting practices. “Values … are part of a network that is anchored by the complex web of practices that constitute our lives. There is nothing beneath that web that would serve as a foundation for it.”44 There is such a foundation, and May states it, without understanding that he does: life itself. Our practices presuppose life, and our most important practices are devoted to sustaining and developing it. As I have already noted, “life” for human beings is inseparably biosocial;

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it cannot be understood as mere metabolic functioning, but without that metabolic functioning, there is nothing else. At root, good and meaningful practice must sustain or develop life in some demonstrable way, for the self and others, in the present and over the openended future of the human project. Where Scheffler, Wolf, and May fall short of my argument is thus on the question of what constitutes the substance of meaning and worthiness. None of them fully answers the questions of what it is we are thinking about and doing, what we are contributing to, when we work for a future good that exceeds the spatiotemporal limits of our lived experience. If it is true that people’s normal motivations include concern for and loving devotion to others, then it follows that they will include in their understanding of the good life creations, actions, and relationships that preserve and enhance present and future life. Meaningful contributions to the good of other lives need not be heroic or “world-historical”: they need to help meet others’ needs and realize their core human capacities in sustainable ways over the open-ended human future. We can unify these three criteria under the idea of collective life-capital. Collective life-capital, recall from the introduction, is McMurtry’s term for all that enables the maintenance and development of human life now and into an open-ended future: “life wealth that can produce more life wealth without loss.”45 When we value ourselves as contributors to an open-ended human future and lovingly devote ourselves to projects that will serve it, we pursue projects that help build up this shared life-capital base: the material and symbolic connective tissue that connects present effort to future life. When one identifies one’s individual good with forms of non-alienated labour that enable its development, one expands one’s individual good to embrace the goods of others now and in the future. One need not be present to see the future good to which one’s present work contributes to understand its goodness, precisely because one has grown beyond the narrow egocentrism that counts as good only what one can own and control. Egocentric hedonism reduces the whole of nature and society to exploitable instruments of the accumulation of money-value for the self, without regard for the long-term consequences that the unlimited demands it makes will necessarily have on nature and other people.

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Life-coherent forms of pleasure, by contrast, exclude all activities and projects that unsustainably exploit nature or other people, not as an oppressive command issued against the recalcitrant, but as a function of materially rational subjective judgment and choice. These activities are ruled out because one has chosen to identify one’s own good with contributions to the good of others outside of one’s own skin. The self who identifies its own good with the present and future good of others is capable of experiencing more and qualitatively higher pleasures than the egocentric hedonist. By “qualitatively higher” I mean forms of pleasure that are not just raw physical states but involve the added satisfaction of knowing and feeling oneself to be a responsible and contributing member of humanity. The production of individual pleasure by contribution to collective life-capital thus expands the circle of enjoyment – the individual feels affirmed in her own self and others are enabled to experience and do more because of her contributions. Egocentric hedonism, by contrast, constricts enjoyment to the most narrow compass possible – the moment-to-moment feelings of Edgeworth’s pleasure-machine. Notice once again the role that recognition of our dependence and interdependence plays in the formation of the motivation to live, act, work, and relate in ways that contribute to collective life-capital. Collective life-capital crosses the environment-economy distinction. In other words, it recognizes the integral biosocial nature of human life. In order to survive and develop, human beings require inputs from the natural world, but also and equally mutualistic human relationships. In its natural aspect, life-capital satisfies the biophysical conditions of our remaining alive as organisms. Since we now know that the natural life-capital base is fragile, it is materially irrational for a ruling value system to permit – indeed, encourage as the very essence of the good life – demand in excess of the limits the regeneration of natural life-capital fixes. However, if individual pleasure is produced through the contributions the individual makes to the ongoing, openended future of humanity, the self-limitation our dependence on a natural environment with finite carrying capacity demands can itself become a source of pleasure. By self-consciously limiting our demands on natural life-capital, we take pleasure in knowing that we are avoiding actions that cause non-necessary harm to other living

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creatures and human beings and thus also that our pleasures are compatible with the pleasures of others. We can justly value ourselves as creators, and not destroyers, so far as this affirmation is compatible with our fundamental needs. Of course, individual commitment to life-coherent forms of pleasure is not sufficient. Unless major social institutions, law, and public policy steer economic decisions in lifecoherent directions, the fundamental ecological and social problems the money-value system causes cannot be solved. My focus on individuals is not meant to suggest that political struggle and social movements are not necessary, but rather to contest the classical liberal argument that the good for individuals is always conceived by those individuals in opposition to other individuals. As Scheffler argued and ordinary experience daily confirms, people desire to contribute to the well-being of others, and feel pleasure when this contribution is confirmed. The infant cannot be happy as an individual unless it is being lovingly cared for by its mother; the attuned mother cannot be happy as an individual if her infant’s life is in danger. An adult cannot maintain happiness in blithe indifference to the destruction of every one of his friends’ and family members’ lives (as the story of Job emphasized). That we may in fact encounter mothers whose happiness can be maintained even in the face of the death of their children or men who actively destroy their friends and families to “get ahead” does not disprove the general claim, but only proves the existence of individual pathologies for which the root psychological and social causes must be found. That total indifference to others is a pathology and not human nature may be proven by a brief thought experiment: Imagine indifference as a universal trait of human behaviour. The species simply could not have survived any crisis that requires genuine solidarity contrary to narrow self-interest.46 Classical philosophy too testifies to the truth of the claim that pure egocentrism is a self-destroying disease. Plato’s deconstruction of the tyrannical self in Book IX of The Republic still resonates today as a masterful demonstration of the way the attempt to outdo everyone else leaves one without any of that which one desires: friends, lovers, wealth, and power.47 Bernie Madoff may be taken as contemporary confirmation of Plato’s point. His attempt to enrich himself at the expense of those he swindled led to his imprisonment,

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ensuring that his last days will be spent alone and impoverished – the very opposite of what he intended. Humans are socially interdependent individuals; our moods, feelings, and emotions are bound up with and fluctuate according to the moods, feelings, and emotions of others to whom we are interrelated, and our success cannot be lastingly achieved in opposition to the good of everyone else, singularly or collectively. Once we subjectively recognize the reality of this objective interdependence, we feel affirmed through the different forms of non-alienated work we do that contributes to the social lifecapital base. Through these contributions the self learns to value itself as worthy of being valued by others because its work expresses genuine care and concern for others’ well-being, whether those others are known (or even knowable) to the self or not. Lasting satisfaction, paradoxically, requires recognition and acceptance of the limitations on our lives that materially independent nature and other people impose. The best life, therefore, is not a life unconstrained by natural dependence and social interdependence, because meaningful activity and relationship depend upon finite individual membership in open-ended natural and social fields of lifesupport and development. Outside of these fields there would be nothing to care about or contribute to, and meaningful human life requires things and people to care about and contribute to, now and into the future. This crucial point must be kept in mind as we now turn to consider the ways in which the most seemingly life-negating manifestation of human finitude, death, is the ultimate frame of meaningful, valuable and valued, good lives. No matter how languidly full of life-valuable experience, activity, and relationships human lives will be in a society in which the objective and subjective conditions of meaningful and good lives have been satisfied, death seems to be the one immovable barrier against life’s complete goodness. We have encountered death twice before in the argument, in the pessimistic lament that it makes life not worth living, and in the technotopian promise to overcome it by shifting the platform of life from the biological to the virtual. I have argued that life need not be lived forever in order to be worth living, but I have only alluded to my positive argument: that life-value is realizable only in a finite life. The value of human life is bound up with our being able

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to make our lives into ethical wholes, complete in terms of the material possibilities presented for life-valuable experience and action. If that is true, then a good life must have an ending. Still, since it is always possible to imagine doing more than one has done or a world better than the world actually is, there is an inescapably tragic element to life. This tragic element, I will suggest by way of conclusion, makes life beautiful, not futile.

chapter 6

Death and the Ethical Wholeness of Life

No matter the extent to which a future society overcomes the extrinsic structural causes of oppression and alienation, no matter how much time future generations are able to devote to non-alienated, life-valuable work upon the world, themselves, and their relationships, every self-creative subject is mortal. Death is the constitutive frame of the constitutive frames of finitude. If we did not die, then the other frames of finitude would be meaningless. However, if those frames of finitude are spurs to the non-alienated work through which meaning and value is produced, then it seems to follow that death is the most essential condition of there being value in life.1 On first glance, this claim seems absurd. As the pessimists and technotopians both maintained, death is the end of all possible lifevalue for the person who dies and as such it must be – if they were correct – either the ruination of mortal existence or the main enemy to overcome. Our own psychological relationship with death seems to bear their arguments out. The end of life-value is precisely what we fear most, and fear is a sign that its object is properly to be avoided. My argument seems to suggest that death should not be an object of fear and therefore should not be avoided, and that conclusion sounds absurd. I am committed to the conclusion that the fullest life-coherent expression and enjoyment of life-capacities for each and all depends upon death, and this conclusion seems to imply a further absurdity: that a finite life contains more life-value than a life unending. This is the conclusion I will draw, but let us note at the outset the qualification I have inserted. While it might be mathematically sound to argue that a life unending would contain more instances of the things and experiences that currently make mortal life valuable, it is not ethically sound, because, as I have already argued and note here again, what matters in human life is not sheer accumulation of experiences,

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etc., but life-coherent action, experience, and relationship. Once we take a life-coherent approach to ethical value, the apparent absurdity will disappear. Materialist ethics distinguishes itself from other materialisms, including most interpretations of historical materialism and the most optimistic articulations of scientific materialism, by its insistence on the importance of limitations to the value of individual life. If it is true that the frames of finitude are challenges that spur us to nonalienated work, and it is through non-alienated work that we create meaningful, valued, and valuable experiences, creations, and relationships, then the proper goal of politics and science cannot be to overcome these intrinsic limitations that define our humanity. The object of transformational politics is the extrinsic barriers to the fullest lifecoherent expression and enjoyment of our life-capacities possible. Life is not, as reductive materialism would have it, metabolic activity serving the goal of passing on genetic material; nor is it pure information processing striving to free itself from a purportedly flawed biological platform as the technotopians believe. Life is integrally unified biosocial activity, physical action, and reflective interpretation of the meaning of that action. In my view, death is not simply a fact about the flesh that must be accepted; it is a necessary frame on life that must be comprehended, like the other frames, in a materially rational way that discloses its relationship to life-value.

6.1 Fear of Death To begin, let us consider the obvious but important objection that fear of death is the subjective manifestation of the objective truth that death is the absolute negation of life-value. If life-value presupposes a living subject to create and experience it, and death means “no longer to be, or to have the possibility of being, the subject of any experiences of any sort whatsoever,” then it seems a straightforward inference that if death negates the existence of the subject, then it negates the life-value of the subject as well.2 If the life-value of the subject dies with the subject, then the good of their life also dies with them. Thomas Nagel draws exactly this conclusion, asserting in his

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famous paper on the meaning and ethical implications of death that it destroys “whatever good there is in living.”3 His view has given rise to an important school of thought that explains death’s badness as determined by the extent to which it deprives formerly living subjects of the goods of living. This school has become known as the “deprivationist” account of death’s badness.4 The pessimists and technotopians might be thought of as extreme versions of the deprivationist account, maintaining that death negates not only the specific value of individual lives, but the general value of mortal existence. Since at some point every living subject will no longer be a subject of experience, the inevitability of death seems to be an absolute negation of life-value. The argument is difficult to refute if one remains confined to an egocentric conception of the goodness of life. Thus, if the goodness of mortal life is to be defended, life must not be viewed only and exclusively from the perspective of the abstract individual ego. Of course, as I noted in my critique of Benatar, the subjective perspective must not be ignored, but nor must the subjective perspective be understood as necessarily egocentric. It is the egocentric perspective on death that turns it into an object of terror, our “ownmost possibility,” of not-being-any-longer-forever, as Heidegger argues, the one event that no one can avoid.5 Brooding on the inescapability of death inspires the “special kind of fear” that Philip Larkin evokes in his unsurpassable poem “Aubade”: Not to be here, Not to be anywhere, And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true. This is a special way of being afraid … Death is no different whined at than withstood. Larkin’s poetic incisiveness cuts through Heidegger’s solution of “resoluteness.” It makes no difference, and this is what terrifies. Scheffler notes this “distinctive kind of terror that is produced by the strange and sui generis thought that I myself – the thinker of my thought, the perceiver of what I perceive – will simply stop being.”6 Is this not proof against his own conclusion that life is made valuable by the

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thought that our lives contribute to the good of those who will live after us? We can think that thought while we are alive, but not while we are dead. The void into which we will pass will swallow us up without remainder, and if we pay attention to the oblivion to which all of our creations are ultimately consigned, the fear will return, and with it the proof that death renders life meaningless. The fact of individual death appears to be destructive of all life-value for the individual, both directly, by bringing biosocial existence to an end, and indirectly, by making enjoyment of life-value impossible because of the dread its contemplation inspires. Philosophical analysis of the precise meaning of death has tried to combat our fears. The first and most famous such analysis is found in Epicurus, who argued that “death is nothing to us … since when we exist, death is not yet present, and when death is present, we do not exist.”7 For Epicurus, close attention to the logical entailments of the idea of not-being, combined with the principle that all good and bad is bound up with feelings of pleasure and pain, yields the conclusion that since we will not feel anything after death, there will be no good or bad, and if there is no good or bad, there can be nothing to fear.8 However, as Larkin’s poem reminds, Epicurus spectacularly misses the point. Fear of death is not fear of pain, it is precisely fear of not being there to feel anything at all. Epicurus’s argument is thus “specious stuff … this is what we fear … nothing to think with, / Nothing to love or link with.”9 Abstract proofs of the sort that Epicurus pioneered are little help in quelling the chill night sweats that the sudden thought of annihilation provoke. Logic cannot transform primal fears into reflective contentment. Perhaps nothing can cure once and for all the fear of death in those who feel it viscerally. As Paul Fairfield argues, “it is wholly understandable that death should make cowards of us all.” Nevertheless, Fairfield continues, “we must come to terms with out finitude.”10 The aim of my argument is not to dispel the fear of death but to help us come to terms with our finitude in a materially rational way. My argument is not that death is not something to be feared, but that fear of death is not proof that it is the absolute antithesis and negation of life-value. Rather, fear of death could equally well be interpreted as proof of the objective value of being alive, an emotional prompt to live well while

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we are here. Human beings not only fear death, we fear losses of all sorts, which, when applied to particular things (a cherished memento, a work of art, a lover), is not taken as proof that the object whose loss we fear is of no value, but rather the opposite, that it is of irreplaceable value. Just as most people do not cease to love because the object of their love may leave or die, neither do most of us cease to act just because the outcome of the action will one day pass into anonymity or oblivion. Consider Larkin’s poem again. He is terrified at the prospect of not-being while he lies reflecting in bed; with the morning light come duties that he rises to fulfill. Action silences the brooding. Along the same poetic lines, in Rilke’s extraordinary Duino Elegies, life and things are always slipping away, and we know them to be slipping away, but we try to hold them present through love and artistic creation: You see we don’t love a single season like the flowers. When we love a sap older than time rises through our arm. My dear it’s like this: that we love inside ourselves not one person not some future being but seething multitudes not a particular child but the fathers who lie at rest in our depths … and the whole soundless landscape under the clouded or clear sky

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of its destiny this my dear came before you.11 As in Dr Rieux’s confrontation with the plague discussed in chapter 4, our capacity to love, Rilke urges, is the power to rise above ourselves, a connection not just to specific others but to the whole coursing of life through time, of which we are but a moment. Situating ourselves amidst this constant engendering and falling away might not cure our fear, but it helps us accept our real situation. The underlying principle is articulated clearly, if not as movingly, by Freud. He maintained that “our bodily organism, itself a part of nature, will always remain a transient structure with a limited capacity for adaptation and achievement. This recognition does not have a paralysing effect … [but rather] points the direction for our activity.”12 Freud is not saying that death is an inevitability which we must face up to and revolt against by enjoying life in spite of it. Rather, he is saying that while we might fear death, a proper, materially rational understanding of it moves us to action, and in action, our capacities are determined by the end that organizes the action. The products of our action endure for a time; they contribute to the things that exist under Rilke’s cloudy and clear skies. While the products of action do not make us literally immortal, attention to them and the contribution that they make to the ongoing development of the human project frees us from the narrow confines of an egocentric understanding of life’s goodness. If we associate the goodness of life not only with subjective experience, but with the life-value that preceded us and made our non-alienated work possible, and, further, the lifevalue that our own non-alienated work creates for others, then the goodness of our life extends beyond our own egocentric attachment to our lives. We might still fear death, but we will not be tempted by the nihilistic conclusion that since each subject must die, there is no value to mortal life at all. In this way consciousness of our mortality can move us to act so that we can live well. Thus, living well becomes the goal that emerges from reflection upon and understanding – coming to terms with – our mortality.

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When the different types of action and the different possible value systems that different types of action serve become the focus of deliberation, the fact of death becomes a secondary concern. This claim is proven by the many historical examples of groups choosing to die rather than submit to a value system they regard as oppressive and dehumanizing. Before the moment of self-chosen death there might have indeed been fear, but the Zealots who killed themselves in Masada rather than submit to Roman conquerors, the militants of the Warsaw ghetto who went down fighting, the millions of Vietnamese who died resisting American imperialism, or any other group under siege and facing extermination by an implacable enemy prove by their decision that for human beings there are some fates worse than death. If that is the case, then while death does indeed end the possibility of those individuals who choose death experiencing any more life-value, the way they choose to die, the moral example they set, creates lifevalue that future generations, hearing their story, can appropriate and use. Suicide teaches another lesson relevant to the critique of the deprivation account of death’s supposed badness. In the case of political suicide, recognized as a dignified end in itself by others, the lesson taught is that life is only worth living if there is some material possibility of living it as a human being, as a socially self-conscious centre of experience and activity valued for the contributions one’s life might make to a free and inclusive society. In the case of suicides of despair, the same lesson is taught, but from the ground of individual alienation from all mutually affirmative interpersonal relationships. Recall from chapter 1 Durkheim’s claim that lasting and permanent alienation from other people increases the risk of suicide. The thought of the inevitability of death does not cause the individual to pull the trigger, but the feeling that he has no purpose in life and that not one other person cares if he lives or dies. As Durkheim concludes, a person “destroys himself less frequently to the degree to which he has things to concern him other than himself.”13 Where each individual has important work to do, has the possibility for a wide range of lifevaluable experiences and some other group of people to share those experiences with, and knows that there is important work to do, enjoyable experiences to have, and others to share those experiences

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with, life is embraced and enjoyed. My conclusion is, therefore, that if we think of our mortality in the context of the values that ought to govern a good society, it is possible that we might still fear our own non-existence when the demands of life relent for a moment, but the value of our life will not be ruined by this fear, because we will exert ourselves in living well the life we have, either enjoying the opportunities for non-alienated work and relationship or struggling politically to create opportunities. When we accept that death is the fundamental limiting frame that shapes our lives, the importance of the goals that our choices serve becomes the paramount concern of living. Coming to terms with finitude means grasping the fact that at some point the person that our choices make us into will be a finished product. If the goodness of our lives depends upon the life-value of our own and others’ lives, then caring about our life means caring about its life-value. If we care about the life-value of our lives, then we care about what others think about us too, since life-value is not only a subjective valuation but also an objective contribution. Hence, to care about life-value is to care about our lives as objects of ethical evaluation. If we grasp the fact that death means that the time for revising our choices, goals, values, and commitments will eventually run out, then it becomes clear that we must care about making the right choices – those that are actually life-valuable – as the condition that must be satisfied to make life good. Caring about making the right choices does not of course entail that we do make the right choice in each particular instance, but it does mean that we are at least focusing on the real problem: living well, not living forever. Understanding the natural and social conditions of our existence and ongoing life entails understanding the contributions that nature and other people make to our life in the form of the life-capital they supply. Recognizing this fact means that my “self” is not some abstract point of consciousness shimmering in the ether, but is the product of nature and past work and, as a present socially self-conscious centre of activity, is constantly and irreducibly enmeshed in networks of relationships that we care about. We are capable of abstracting ourselves in mind from these relationships, but to the extent that we care about life and what makes it good, we will always be led back to the

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relationships themselves: to other people, experiences of the world, and practical relationships with things. People who love life and desire to live well must, therefore, affirm the essential role these connections to nature and other people play in their being here as social self-conscious individuals. Caring about one’s own life means caring about the natural forces and the lives of others who help sustain it and whose lives in turn one’s non-alienated labour helps sustain. The connections between one’s own good, the good of one’s actions, and the good of nature and other people’s lives need not be limited to the present of one’s own subjective existence. In fact, there is no pre-set limit to how far our own caring work and the good of future human beings might extend. Even if the author of the work becomes anonymous, the life-value of the work can continue; even though the self-conscious ego disappears, the value of its contribution need not. Thus, the fact of our own death need not drive us into permanent fearful attachment to the preservation of our own ego, but rather could, if we adjust our perspective on our identity, lead to deeper commitment to spending life engaged in non-alienated and life-valuable work. In fact, not only do many people commit themselves to projects whose full life-value they will not live to see (as Scheffler argued), many people, in dire circumstances, actively end their own lives for the sake of enabling the lives of others to go on, identifying their own good in this case with the good of the future life their sacrifice enables. Above, I considered the cases of historical political sacrifices, but far more numerous are daily sacrifices chosen by people whose names are soon forgotten but whose choices allow others – usually (but not always) younger – to live and realize the potential life-value of which they would otherwise have been deprived. Older family members sacrifice themselves for children or grandchildren; strangers sacrifice themselves for children who are on the brink of death. The fact that strangers are willing to sacrifice themselves for young people not related to them proves that what is occurring is more than a reflex of the biological drive to protect one’s own genetic lineage. The sacrifice that strangers make can only be fully explained as an act of love for the goodness of potential life that children as young human beings and not specific relations represent. The stranger who sacrifices their life for a young person they do not know cannot

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bear the thought of allowing the child to be deprived of the goods a longer life can in principle contain. To make this future possible, the person sacrifices the potential life-value they have left for the sake of enabling the child to realize the greater potential life-value of their undeveloped life. People who make these heroic choices prove by their actions that there is value to the life that continues after they have died. If there were not, we would have to conclude that all sacrifice of self is in vain. This example is one case in which the contribution that one’s actions can make to future life-value is regarded as more important than preserving one’s own existence for as long as possible. If the deprivation account were correct and people universally regarded their own death as bad, such choices would be difficult, if not impossible, to explain. The point is that in our active and engaged lives it is not always only our ego, but also – and sometimes more so – the lives of others whom we bind ourselves to or who are bound to us in caring relationships that we strive to protect and make good. The set of those to whom we feel ourselves bound is not mechanically determined by genetic connections. We can identify with as broad a group of people as we choose to open our capacity to care towards. We can care about our own selves exclusively, our family, our nation, the whole of humanity throughout time, all sentient beings throughout time, or even all matter and energy in all its life-sustaining forms and functions through all time. However far we extend our care and concern, it must take the form, if it is to be materially effective, of care for nature and society. If we care about our own lives, then we must care about the lives of the others upon whom we depend. If we care about that larger set of lives, we must care about the natural and social conditions that support them and enable them to develop their lifecapacities. The interactions that define our active lives allow the ego to reground and identify itself within, as a member of, the life-sustaining networks of natural and social life-capital. This conclusion is not determined solely by abstract philosophical reflection. Concrete reflection on what we actually care about when we in fact care supports the argument. As McMurtry argues: “Consider your own life, what you know best. Every value you enjoy, lose or gain has a bottom line – its life capital, what enables life to

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reproduce and grow rather than degrade and stagnate through time. We defend it and our health by buying life goods and nothing else. The turning point is as old as physical and cultural evolution. Every human advance is by knowing what enables life from what does not. Collective life advance is transmitting this life-and-death knowledge across selves, space-time and generations.”14 Alone and in fear, the ego thinks that value attaches to itself as a persisting solitary point, a mere being-there, as Heidegger might say. When it comes out of itself to engage with reality, the ego realizes that it is a specific individual member of a natural-social world whose enjoyment of life grows the more it recognizes the connections linking its life to the life of the whole, and the more it actively cultivates these and builds more. When individuals open the circle of their conscious attachment and caring towards nature and other human beings, they understand that self-consciousness is always social self-consciousness; they are better able to devote their own specific lives to the improvement of the conditions of the lives of others and find meaning in this devotion and obligation. Instead of experiencing nihilist rage at the injustice of their own death, the person who undertakes the philosophical work described here emerges on the other side seeing death as the motivation to live well and understands living well to involve more than just momentto-moment accumulation of enjoyments. The deprivation account of death’s badness recognizes the moment-to-moment accumulation of enjoyment, notes that death is the end of moment-to-moment enjoyments, and concludes that death negates the value and meaning of life for the subject. This account misses the sociohistorical continuum of non-alienated work through which the self contributes to collective life-capital and thereby shapes itself into a member of the world who values life. The self will die, but not before it has made real contributions to life-capital, which become material for future non-alienated labour. A teacher teaches twenty students, who are inspired to become teachers themselves; each goes on to teach twenty more students. The farmer grows food that sustains a thousand people, who become teachers, carpenters, computer programmers, healers, artists, parents. The parents love their children and send them into a world where there are teachers and healers and carpenters and

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artists, and they are inspired to become a teacher or a healer in turn, and so on, if not ad infinitum then for a period of time whose end point cannot be specified. Identifying one’s good with the contribution to collective lifecapital that one’s non-alienated work makes to the ongoing future of the human historical project means affirming not one’s own momentto-moment enjoyment but the life-value of the contributions one makes as of ultimate importance. This transformation of egocentric into social self-consciousness is more than reconciliation with a brute natural fact – death – which, were it possible, we would eliminate from our lives. This transformation affirms the goodness of real life as finite and mortal. If I have realized my life-capacities in ways that have contributed to the well-being of others, then I can die satisfied that my limited portion of life time was sufficient for the purposes I have posited for myself. As Marcuse argues in a passage that I have cited before: “The necessity of death does not refute the possibility of final liberation. Like other necessities, it can be made rational … Men can die without anxiety if they know that what they love is protected from misery and oblivion. After a fulfilled life, they may take it upon themselves to die – at a moment of their own choosing.”15 If fear of death is not necessarily or totally dispelled by this philosophical labour, the belief that individual death makes life meaningless should be. In fact, the truth is the opposite: if we never died, life would become meaningless because there would be no demands made on the self to do something life-valuable now. If death were abolished, all that would be left is egocentric hedonism without purpose or meaning. There would no longer be any reason to contribute anything of value to others, because the virtual avatars we would become would need nothing. The technotopians turn St Paul’s “Let us eat and drink, for we will be dead tomorrow” on its head, proclaiming that in the technologically emancipated future, “we can eat and drink as much as we please, because the tomorrow of our death will never come.”16 Remember, the technotopian aim is to free the capacity for sensuous enjoyment from all biological limits. Yet, no human pleasure remains pleasurable for long, not only because, as Freud argues, pleasures require contrast and varying intensity, but more deeply, as Freud as

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well as Marx (and Marcuse, for that matter) noted, human beings need and desire to work in non-alienated ways.17 To these predecessors I add: it is through non-alienated work, not only upon the world, as Freud and Marx and Marcuse emphasize, but on ourselves as well that we produce the meaning of mortal existence. This philosophical work can also change our understanding of the meaning and significance of our own deaths. Instead of a catastrophe, death – after a life well lived – can be judged to be a final contribution to others’ lives. Death is not only the destruction of the individual; it is, equally, the creation of life time and space for new lives. As Lucretius was perhaps the first to point out, death ensures that there will be a future. “Come now,” he enjoins his readers, “put away all that is unbecoming to your years and compose your mind to make way for others … The old is always thrust aside to make way for the new, and one thing must be built out of the wreck of others. There is no murky pit of Tartarus awaiting anyone. There is need of matter, so that later generations may arise; when they have lived out their span, they will follow you.”18 Lucretius is not arguing that the individual is nothing but the vehicle of nature and the species, valueless in itself but only as a means to the end of propagation. Rather, he is saying that the proper estimation of the value of individual life must be made within the frames of nature and society. Once it is set within these frames, it becomes clear that the death of each individual is at the same time the creation of life time and space for new generations. As Nussbaum, commenting on Lucretius, argues, “the perpetuation [of life] cannot be indefinite, without squeezing out the new … your loss is someone else’s good, and what you most wish to avoid is necessary and good for unborn others.”19 While death is a loss of life for the one who dies, the created life-value is not lost but allowed to grow in new directions through the new experiences, actions, and contributions of new people who are born. The good of living is not reducible to the good of my experience, because my life is also the creation of life-capital that others employ after I am gone. My dying is a final contribution to the possibility of others being able to live, enjoy, and work. Hence it is not the case, as Nagel argued, that death is the loss of whatever good there is in living and that all of our endings will be bad, since the good we

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create extends beyond our subjective experience to include the creation of objective life-value in the form of collective life-capital. If others are to enjoy this collective life-capital there must be life time and space for them to do so, and the creation of this life time and space requires that earlier generations create it through their own deaths. Still, the good that one affirms in accepting mortality is not the good of one’s own dying as such, but the good of human life as a whole extending into the open-ended future of which one’s contributions, but not one’s self, will be a part. Everyone whose work contributes to life-capital, even if those contributions are anonymous and unrecognized, is helping to ensure that the life-requirements of future generations of human beings will be met and the human historical project will continue. The final component of that contribution is death, through which we create life time and space for others to live in their turn. There is thus a direct connection between present lives, death, and as yet unborn human beings. Since future life is seamlessly engendered from moment to moment by reproductive and caring acts in the present, our obligations to future life are really just obligations to life as it is actually unfolding in the present. Since we also know that future humans, being human, will require the same general sets of natural resources and social institutions as well as life space and life time if they are to develop and flourish, the implication is clear: every generation has an obligation to act in a life-coherent manner so as to ensure that the resources, institutions, and life time and space that future human beings will require will be available. An example from recent history helps to explain this point. In the spring of 2014 another round of budget cuts was imposed upon the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (cbc). In response, veteran cbc journalist Linden MacIntyre publicly announced that he would retire in the hopes that his place would be filled by a younger journalist. While a supererogatory act in one sense (he had enough seniority that he did not have to step aside, no one asked him to, and no one would have faulted him had he not), in another, more important sense, his decision is what one would expect from a materially rational person thinking of his own good in relation to its natural and social conditions of possibility and the need of future generations (of journalists, in this case) to find the institutional life space and time in

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which their own careers can be forged. MacIntyre himself explains it best: “It’s pretty obvious that the energies and the imagination and the future of an institution depends on the intake of young people. They don’t have what I have because I’ve been around a long time, but they will if they’re allowed to be around. They will acquire everything I have acquired and more. Without that potential, the place is doomed.”20 Note how MacIntyre situates his individually satisfying career in the enabling power of the larger social institution. His subjective good as one of the country’s leading investigative journalists depended upon the objective good of the institution of the cbc. At the same time, the objective good of the cbc is not a thing apart from the excellence of its workers. MacIntyre’s excellence as a journalist would not have been realized without that institutional home, but nor could that institutional home have existed without his and others’ work. He was sustained by the cbc and in turn his work helped sustain it, making it a place in which young journalists want to work. His own excellence helped create the potential for the future excellence that his retiring will help actualize (by creating space for young journalists to flourish). Excellent institutions demand both continuity and novelty; new members learn from older members not just what to do, but what has not yet been done that they might do. Lifevalue depends upon the growth and development of human capacities over the open-ended future. Growth and development require life time and space in which to unfold. MacIntyre is proof that it is possible to ethically value the future good of future others, not in opposition to one’s own good (he does not regard young journalists as competitors), but as part of the good our lives have helped to create. Just as MacIntyre did not view his younger colleagues as competitors for scarce resources, but as partners in a larger professionalinstitutional whole whose existence made possible their individual professional goods, neither, in general, are our contemporaries and future generations necessarily competitors for scarce life time and space. If we restrict our demands on the natural world to life-coherent limits, then the species can continue to exist for an open-ended amount of time. If we organize our social institutions so as to ensure the universal and comprehensive satisfaction of our needs within environmentally sustainable limits, then there need not be destructive conflict,

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either between contemporaries or between generations, over resources and opportunities to make creative and productive contributions through the manifold forms of non-alienated work that create meaning in life. As MacIntyre stands to his younger colleagues, so too all of us stand to future generations. Each of us should set the example of living well, unfolding our capacities in life-valuable ways, struggling against the social forces that impede that essential human goal, and then willingly stepping aside so that others might emulate and improve upon the example we have set. My ultimate point is that the life-value of individual lives is not undermined by the fact that individuals die, because the contributions that we make live on. We can learn to accept individually limited shares of the total possible good of human life as such. What matters is that a good life face as few extrinsic barriers to the enjoyed, life-coherent realization of its capacities as possible, and not (as the technotopians demanded) that it face no intrinsic barriers. Being an individual is essentially an intrinsic barrier to experiencing the absolute good (which would be the totality of the good of the human species developed over the whole of its history). I will examine the meaning and implications of what individual life as an ethical whole means and its relationship to the absolute good of the species in the next section. Before turning to that problem, a final objection to the position developed in this section must be examined. If it is the case that people have an obligation at some point to cede their place in life for the sake of contributing to the life space and time of developing young and more distantly future life, does it not follow that I am imposing a “duty to die” at some age specified as optimal by ecological considerations? Moreover, if I do impose a duty to die, must I not also contemplate the use of social power against recalcitrant individuals who out of fear or love of their own individual life refuse to act on this duty to die and struggle to live as long as possible? Both these conclusions seem monstrous, or, if not monstrous, certainly in tension with the fundamental goal of my argument to clarify the general conditions for the maximization of life-value for each and all. A duty to die seems to treat the old as a mere means to the lives of the young, and this sort of instrumentalization is incompatible with the dialectical relationship between individual and

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society that I have been defending (i.e., that the good of the whole is advanced through the full realization of the good of each, and not through the sacrifice of some individuals). There are in fact arguments that affirm a duty to die. Perhaps the best known is that of the bioethicist John Hardwig. He was writing in the context of the pre–Affordable Care Act United States in which prolonged medical care for elderly loved ones could bankrupt a family.21 Hardwig argued that, as a consequence of the financial and emotional burden a prolonged death can cause, elderly people had a duty to die in order to not ruin younger family members. Hardwig then generalized from this example to conclude that there is a universal duty to die. This duty is rooted in considerations of resource scarcity. Life requires resources. At some point, the resources it takes to keep an elderly and mostly inactive person alive will detract from the resources that younger and more vigorous people have access to, and this restriction of access for the young and vigorous to keep alive the old and very ill is unjust. “Often, it would be wrong to do just what we want or just what is best for ourselves; we should choose in light of what is best for all concerned. That is our duty in sickness as well as in health. It is out of these responsibilities that a duty to die can develop.”22 I agree with Hardwig that one’s own good must be understood in light of considerations about what is good for all concerned, but I do not draw the same inference about an individuated duty to die. In general, no one has a duty to undergo that which will take place whether one wills it or not. My argument is not deontological in this sense (although it does regard each person as an end in themselves). Death will occur whether or not dying is treated as a duty. What Hardwig is really concerned with is not dying but using up scarce resources. However, what he ignores is the fact that resource use is determined by a society’s ruling value system. Where health care is publicly funded, younger generations need not bankrupt themselves to care for the elderly. Thus, one could rejoin to Hardwig that were resources not wasted on military hardware and the meaningless junk that fills the shelves of supermarkets and shopping malls, tremendous wealth would be freed for more life-valuable uses, shrinking the eco-

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logical footprint of individuals, thus making it possible for everyone to live out their natural lifespan without creating ecological crisis. Of course, resources are not infinite, and the limited quantities of resources mean that individuals must at some point attenuate their demands, which is the whole point of the philosophical labour of accepting our mortality that I have been explaining. However, accepting our mortality and affirming a universal duty to die are distinct moral principles. If the average lifespan continues to increase, and resources remain finite (even if their use is elastic), then there could come a point when longer lifespans for individuals will enter into conflict with a lifecoherent use of resources that takes the open-ended future as its frame of reference. This response poses two questions. First: does the problem of the duty to die return? Second: how long is too long a lifespan? In response to the first question, I believe that my initial argument still stands. There is no need to take on as duty that which will happen naturally (assuming that death continues to happen naturally). There is a duty to not demand an unlimited share of finite resources such that others are deprived of what they equally well require to live, but that duty is conceptually distinct from a duty to die: we can arrive at it by autonomous reflection and treat it not as a duty to die, but as a duty to live well and not demand more of what we need once what we need will deprive future generations. In general, the more we help to ensure the conditions of future life, the more life-value it becomes possible for humanity as a whole to create. Contrary to the technotopians, but in agreement with Hardwig, individual life is not private property that may be extended without any consideration at all for the price others have to pay. Individuals might, to use an analogy, have a right to self-defence against a particular assailant, but not to a genocidal rampage against the ethnic group to which the assailant belongs. However, by the same reasoning, just as life is not private property, neither is death an abstract individual obligation. Rather, accepting the necessity of death after a life in which as much life-value as possible has been actualized is a conclusion people will unproblematically reach if they undertake the sort of philosophical reflection I have been explicating. Scheffler pointed

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out “the limits of our egoism” in the concern that there be a future for humanity after one dies.23 If dying is the catastrophe that the technotopians believe it to be, why is there is no society-wide rebellion, no collective raging against the injustice of the dying of the light? That there is not widespread social effort to achieve immortality (the technotopians are definitely a niche market) tells us that people are capable of valuing their own lives as singular moments of life-value. They do not demand immortality because they do not feel that meaningful and valuable life requires it; fear of death does not encourage an egocentric fixation on the existence of the abstract individual self for as long as possible. If there is no necessary egocentric fixation on the prolongation of the self for as long as possible, then we can trust that people who have undertaken the proper philosophical reflection on the realities of their life will continue to accept their own deaths with equanimity, obviating the need for any general duty to die. Our duty is to promote this sound philosophical reflection, not to engineer Logan’s Run–like death festivals for the elderly.24 At the same time, accepting that life must have an end does not imply that there is some mathematically optimal age at which everyone should die. The human life cycle (birth, maturation, aging, and death) is natural and there is life-value in each moment, but the history of social development and medical science proves that the age of natural death is not static. Human life expectancy has proven to be elastic, growing as the social determinants of health are better satisfied and scientific understanding devoted to improving human lifeconditions advances. Other things being equal, and adequate public resources being available and devoted to addressing the practical problems an aging population raises (the adequacy of pension funds, the availability of quality care for dependent aged people, a restructured division of social labour time to ensure that there are opportunities for productive work for all who require it), extending the human lifespan can be both individually life-valuable and ecologically and socially life-coherent. There are, however, certain qualifications to this conclusion, which distinguish it from what Overall calls a “prolongevist” position (that increases in lifespan are always good and should be a fundamental social goal).25

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The first qualification is that lifespan extension is not an abstract techno-medical problem to be solved by capitalist medical science for those who can pay, but a problem of social health that should be addressed by satisfying the social determinants of health more universally and comprehensively. The practical implication of this position is that lifespan should be increased at a globally life-coherent rate, as opposed to a (potentially) rapidly accelerating rate for the rich and a stagnating (or even declining) rate for the poor. The second qualification is closely related to the first. The good of human lifespan extension must be shared by all, not some arbitrary sub-groups of human beings. In practical terms, that means that efforts and resources should be focused on increasing the lowest lifespans towards the highest currently attained lifespans and that a position of much greater life-time equality must be achieved before resources are devoted to further increasing the lifespans of the healthiest and wealthiest. I agree with Richard Momeyer’s argument that it is “far preferable … to devote effort to … assuring more people the opportunity to live what is presently a ‘natural’ life span than to seek to prolong endlessly the lives of the few.”26 The third qualification extends this reasoning to other life on the planet. Life-coherent extension of the human lifespan must not crowd out other species, whose existence is not only important to help ensure the ecological balance human life requires but also intrinsically valuable for the members of those species themselves. Consider a hypothetical but plausible example of two alternative futures. If democratic social development and universal and comprehensive satisfaction of the social determinants of health were able to double the lifespans of the poorest four billion people on the globe without reducing the lifespans of the other three billion and without increasing the total amount of resources used, the potential life-value those people could create and enjoy would also double. If, alternatively, the lifespans of the wealthiest 1 per cent were increased by two years through concentrating resources on expensive medicaltechnical attacks on the aging process (assume for the sake of argument the costs of each alternative are roughly equivalent) the potential life value would increase for a few million people, while remaining at

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current levels for everyone else. A slower rise in overall life expectancy that starts with the project of increasing life time for those with lower life expectancies also gives the healthiest and wealthiest countries time to deal with the already emerging practical problems of aging populations (health care costs, funding of pensions, opportunities for the young to start careers and make contributions to their society, etc.). Increases in lifespan, like all other social changes, must be regulated by the principle of life-coherence. If so regulated, gains in life time will benefit those with the shortest lifespans first; they will not overtax the natural life-support system and will be accompanied by democratic changes to ensure that existing life space is shared between younger and older people such that all have room to express and enjoy the life-capacities that make life meaningful and worthwhile. An unreflective rush towards greater longevity without lifecoherent regulation could easily result in something akin to Derek Parfit’s “repugnant conclusion.” Parfit reasoned that if we accept the basic utilitarian premise that the best future is one in which greatest overall happiness is achieved, this principle could not rule out a future in which there were a vast number of people leading immiserated lives that they nevertheless preferred to being dead, being better than a future in which there were only a small number of very happy people.27 His point was that simply summing some abstract quality like “happiness” is not a sound moral approach to the problem of the good of future generations. The important implication for present purposes is that heroic efforts to increase lifespan, whether motivated by fear of death or love of life or both, can have foreseeably disastrous consequences if not regulated by deeper considerations of life-coherent patterns of living. The best future for human beings is the one in which there are as many people living as long lives as is life-coherently possible, i.e., within the frames that distinguish us as individuals and in a way that is compatible with each generation enjoying access to as much life-capital as is necessary for the universal and comprehensive satisfaction of the fundamental life-requirements of good human lives now and into the open-ended future. The expanded sense of self I have been explicating and defending is not threatened by, but depends upon, accepting individual mortality.

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If we accept our own individual mortality, then there is no need to take on a duty to die. If each person values life in a materially rational way, it follows that they value it as it is: of limited temporal duration. This limitation does not ruin the life-value of the experiences, activities, and relationships that define the content of our lives and will keep in check the desire to demand more resources just to keep us breathing. Once there is no more possibility of self-realizing activity, valuable life has come to an end, and philosophically reflective, materially rational people will choose to die. That choice is not the same as accepting a duty to die – it is a straightforward consequence of the intense commitment to living well.

6.2 Death, Individuation, and Creating Meaning in Life If the arguments that I articulated in the previous section are to be effective in changing individual value-commitments and patterns of living, they must be articulated in emotionally resonant ways that make people feel, and not just think, differently. Just as no philosophical argument can ensure that the fear of death can be overcome, no philosophical argument will succeed unaccompanied by examples and modes of expression that make people feel differently about what is important. At the same time as philosophy must work to build arguments that give people reasons to identify themselves as contributing members of the general human project of world-creation, it must also seek out – from life, from literature – examples that aid us in accepting the principle that necessities like death that cannot be changed are not antithetical to the good of life. The deprivationists are correct to say that people fear death because of its finality. I do not deny this claim, but rather try to tease out the deeper lesson that it teaches: we fear death because it ends life, which proves that finite life is of supreme value – otherwise, why fear its loss? Reconciling ourselves with death’s finality means embracing the life that we have as the irreplaceable opportunity to live well, by trying to make our lives unified ethical wholes. In this section I want to focus on the effort to make life into a meaningful whole.

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Our mortality should be understood as a spur to work not just on this or that aspect of ourselves or for the sake of this or that relationship, but on our character, on the person we make ourselves to be as defined by the principles that our lives have served. It is death above all that encourages self-consciousness, and self-consciousness achieved in light of consciousness of death is consciousness of being a unique and unrepeatable entity that must live well now, or not at all. As Kierkegaard argued, “the fact of my own death is not for me by any means … a something in general … if the task of life is to become subjective, then every subject will for himself become the very opposite of a something in general.”28 In contemplating my death, I become self-conscious, i.e., conscious of myself as a specific entity, a person faced with the challenge of forging an identity through nonalienated work in relation to the specific life-values to which I am committed. My life becomes something serious and not just a game when it is energized by the desire to make it matter through the contributions it makes. Fear of death is, as Larkin’s poem made too perfectly clear, fear of not-being. However, the other side of fear of not-being is intense attachment to being here. Like Donne in his sickness, Larkin in his terror is reflected back into himself; the world fades away and all that remains is this point of self-consciousness aware that this awareness will one day go out, forever. Yet attention to my capacity to act, and to the fact that at some unknown point in the future I will no longer be capable of acting, can also function as the most powerful motivation to live well. The problem is that because the moment of death is usually unknown, many people reason from the premise that since they will (likely) not die in the next instant, there is no urgency to act. The fallacy implicit here is that people reason that since they will not likely die in the next instant, they have unlimited time in which to act, which does not follow. Despite its being obviously fallacious, the inference is difficult to refute in any practically meaningful way if we stick with logical critique alone. Literary examples here become essential in changing the motivational structure of people tempted by this sort of understandable, but still fallacious, reasoning. Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich is a masterful literary exploration of the truth that since death can come unexpectedly, we must

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live every moment as if we will be judged on what we have done up to that moment. As Victor Brombert argues, “Tolstoy’s singular achievement” in this story “is that he conveys Ivan Ilyich’s terror in the face of death not in philosophical or abstract terms, but as a subjective and visceral experience.”29 It is not until Ilyich feels death closing the door on his life that he understands, philosophically, what had been wrong with his life. As it becomes clear to Ivan that he is dying, it also becomes clear to him that his life has been devoid of the philosophical work upon the self upon which the capacity to make life-valuable choices depends. He realizes that all the trivial pleasures to which he devoted himself were purchased at the cost of his integrity, that they were not of any real importance, and that they have cost him, now, in his final moments, the ability to say that he has lived a good life: “It struck him that those scarcely detected inclinations to fight against what the most highly placed people regarded as good … might have been the real thing … and his professional duties, and his ordering of his life, and all his social … interests … might all have been false … He saw plainly that it was all … a horrible monstrous lie … This consciousness increased his physical suffering tenfold.”30 Had he undertaken the philosophical work that human mortality challenges us to undertake, he would not have lived selfishly but rather taken courage in the fight against those suffocating cultural conventions and the people whose social power depended upon their maintenance. He would have lived his own good in a way that advanced in some particular way the good of others, now and in the future. Given over exclusively to socially approved ephemeral pleasures that contributed nothing, Ilyich runs out of opportunities to change. When he recognizes what a conventional coward he has been, he screams in torment for three days.31 His screams express the recognition that living well requires that we care, about the self, about others, and about the natural world. The felt recognition of death concentrates attention on the brevity of individual life and helps us to make our choices seriously. Making our choices seriously means acting and feeling that the obligation to repay, give back, and contribute to collective life-capital is not an external impediment to our being happy, but the very core of a life that is valuable to the self and valued by others. In pursuing these goals, we struggle to make our lives something specific and ethically whole.

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The story of Ilyich teaches that the earlier we begin to meditate upon the necessity of our own deaths, the earlier we can begin to understand the ways in which life-value is bound up with mortality, the more we can enlarge our sense of self to identify with the larger fields of natural and social life to which our non-alienated labour contributes. This enlarged sense of self enables us to value each moment of our own lives more fully than if we live in egocentric lament at the inevitability of our own annihilation, while maintaining consciousness of that inevitability helps us not to waste the life we do have. What human beings regard as superabundant they tend to waste, disvalue, and despoil, even when that which is wasted, disvalued, and despoiled is essential to life. The history of capitalist society up until the birth of the environmental movement in the 1970s is confirmation of this claim. The three most essential material inputs to life, the oxygen of the atmosphere, the waters of the hydrosphere, and the arable lands of the biosphere, were polluted and wasted (and still are, although there is more serious recognition of the material irrationality of permanently destroying scarce, irreplaceable sources of biological life-requirement satisfiers). An analogous principle holds in regard to our own lives: we can waste irreplaceably scarce life time if we do not regularly think of the reality and inescapability of death. It might be thought a morbid fixation that ruins the enjoyment of life to repeatedly call to mind the truth that every day lived brings death one day closer. It may be inevitable that such a thought cannot be fully understood without some tinge of despair, but at the same time it emphasizes that we cannot waste the next moment. Socially self-conscious beings that interpret the events and experiences of their lives can fail to subjectively value that which is of objective life-value. A cat might not give thanks for a bowl of water when it is thirsty, but it drinks the water, showing gratitude in the only way it can – by using the resource proffered to sustain life. We can use resources to objectively satisfy our life-requirements (by, say, breathing air) but fail to place subjective value on the resource (by continuing to drive polluting automobiles that destroy the atmosphere our lives require). An analogous incoherence occurs in the case of the technotopian wish for immortality. They accept the objective value of life, but they refuse to subjectively value it within its constitutive

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frames of finitude. If instead of wishing for life unlimited, we accept the challenge of our mortality to undertake the non-alienated work to make our lives a meaningful whole, we will discover that the very shortness of life that we fear is the reason why we must commit ourselves to living, and not just sleepwalk or distract ourselves from the material limits within which we live. When we recognize life time for the scarce and precious resource that it is, we are more likely to subjectively value its objective value, seeking in every moment the opportunity to create life-value. Nussbaum clearly captures this relationship between recognized finitude, effort to live well, and the creation of meaningful lives in her interpretation of Stoic ethics: “Our finitude, and in particular our mortality … which conditions all our awareness of other limits, is a constitutive factor in all valuable things’ having the value for us that in fact they have. In these constraints we live, and see whatever we see, cherish whatever we cherish, as beings moving in the way we actually move, from birth through time to a necessary death.”32 When we live in materially rational consciousness of the frame of death as final, we can generate the motivation to live well from within. This motivation, in principle, ought to illuminate each moment of life with the light of enjoyment, or, if not, the demand that whatever impedes enjoyment be transformed. Recall that by “enjoyment” I do not mean abstract individual pleasure without regard for others: a socially self-conscious person does not glory in that which oppresses or harms others. The truly satisfying pleasures of life are the result of activities that enable others to enjoy life as well. A teacher is satisfied when they lead a class in which everyone knows and feels that they have learned something essential. They might need to get paid, but their satisfactions as a teacher are not reducible to a paycheque. Presumably, if we lived in an economy where money was not needed as means of exchange for fundamental life-requirements, people would still teach but would no longer be paid. The pressures of life might weigh upon the teacher such that they do not feel like giving their all on a particular day; the thought backed up by the feeling that this day might be their final class helps overcome the motivation-sapping clouds of mundane problems. So too in every aspect of life-activity: the thought that this time might be the last time should motivate anyone to find

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in every moment as much life-value as there is, or to work to change whatever is unjustly limiting life-value. In general, feeling the inevitability of death makes each moment of life urgent and challenges us to never shirk the moment of opportunity for non-alienated experience and enjoyment. If we always had tomorrow to make the object of our desire love us, to craft the sentence that perfectly expressed our meaning, to really make the effort needed to contribute our ideas to the team, if other people did not need our efforts today to help them get out of prison, to stop missiles from destroying their lives and livelihoods, to help ensure they are clothed and sheltered, then what we did today would be a matter of indifference. The entire character of our lives – and thus our entire character – is bound up not with what we could, should, or ought to have done and cared about, but what we did in fact do, within the limits of our power, when others or circumstances called upon us to do it. No one was a good friend who did not put themselves out when a friend was in need; no one can be a good human who did not lend their voice to the struggle against injustice when they were asked for support. But the struggle for social justice, for cleaner environments, to understand a poem, to organize neighbours to clean a ravine, to help a friend through the loss of a partner, everything that helps to enable oneself and others to express our capacities is a form of nonalienated labour. The good of life is the socially self-conscious realization of human sentient, relational, intellectual, and practically creative capacities, in life-coherent forms of expression, that add to the life-capital from which others will draw upon to express and enjoy their capacities. The means by which these capacities are realized – paying attention to and interpreting experience; learning to communicate with and relate to others in mutually affirming ways, to create beauty and scientific understanding, to treat nature and society as life-support and life-development systems; and working out the practical means of institutionalizing life-coherent value systems are the forms of non-alienated human labour through which finite life is made meaningful and worth living. To link the good of life to these forms of non-alienated labour is not to affirm a life of dour seriousness, as a hedonist might object. Nonalienated labour certainly does not exclude enjoying experience and

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activity for its own sake (life-value is synthetically subjective and objective, good for and enjoyed by the self and others). A smiling face lost in play, the desire to tarry forever in the presence of great beauty, or the sheer excitement of awakening to a new day are all intrinsically valuable and as such the proper objects of a materially rational life. Life should be enjoyed, but not at the expense of others and never selfishly when the context requires our help to solve a social problem. Across the fields of life-valuable experience there is beauty. We can speak of a beautiful experience, a beautiful connection or relationship, a beautiful person, a beautiful scientific theory, a beautiful idea, and a beautiful artwork. We can also speak meaningfully of the beauty of struggle and the beauty of freedom. Non-alienated work is for the sake of beauty and joy in living. At the same time, there is also violence and the ugliness of unnecessary suffering. Our capacities to feel and think mean that there is no excuse for ignorance about the plight of others and its causes. A good life should not refuse enjoyment just because others are suffering (no one would ever enjoy life, in that case), but it cannot be good if its enjoyment is the cause of suffering, or if it closes itself off from suffering in wilful ignorance. That consciousness of others’ suffering ruins our own enjoyment means that we must work to end it, when and where circumstances make us the person whose action will do the most good. By the same reasoning a good life should also include, as a component part, fun and games. My argument is not directed against fun and games as (to follow Aristotle) respites from the hard (nonalienated) work of living.33 What I reject is fun and games as the primary end or goal of life. Because human beings have deep intellectual capacities and an exquisite ability to build social worlds on the basis of our ideas, fun and games, as the sole purposes of life, fail to satisfy. Even though the struggle to realize those capacities can be painful, their realization alone provides satisfactions adequate to our potential. We know that playing games cannot be the primary goal of life because they get boring so quickly. As Scheffler notes, games are activities whose outcomes do not really matter, either to the winner or to the loser, who still face the same fundamental problems in life.34 The very nature of games requires the players to suspend the real material stakes of life that demand our attention, elicit our efforts,

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and make us commit to decisions that matter because we recognize that those decisions have implications for others’ lives. To conceive of life as a game, actual or virtual (which the technotopians do), is to admit that what goes on in it does not really matter. If the superintelligence playing it retained any humanity at all (and remember, the whole point of re-engineering biological life is to allow actual human personalities to be copied into a virtual format), surely it would understand, because its understanding is unlimited, that its existence had no defining purpose at all. Would it not then wish for death, as humans do, when they collapse in despair at a life they regard as without value? If life does not really matter because it has no purpose, it is impossible that any human being, or any virtual copy that retained any humanity, could desire to live it forever. Underlying the desire to live forever is not only the belief that life is fun, because most of what is important in life is difficult and not fun in the usual sense, and those aspects of life that are fun grow tedious quickly if made into ultimate ends. What must also underlie the desire to live forever is the belief that life experience and activity matter: to oneself and to other people, now and in the future. As Schopenhauer pointed out, what people want out of immortality is the endless perpetuation of their particular person. But if my arguments are correct, that which is valued and valuable about their person – their loves, the vigour of their bodies and the acuity of their senses, their tastes, their projects, and their principles – that which matters to them, in other words, depends upon the matter of life: the body, its natural and social worlds, and therefore also its finite limits. This inference has been denied by critics of Bernard Williams’s famous argument that immortality is not to be desired because it would grow tedious.35 Williams maintained (like Schopenhauer) that what people desire in immortality is the persistence of their specific identity through time. The value of this identity, Williams argued, is bound up with its categorical desires, the desires that give life meaning and direction. Williams argued that either we would change so drastically over unlimited time that we would lose our identity, or we would lose interest in having further categorical desires, and immortality

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would grow tedious. In support of that claim he drew on the Janáček opera version of the Čapek play The Makropulos Secret, the story of a forty-two-year-old woman who had access to an immortality potion which she decided, after three hundred years, to stop drinking, because her life had grown unbearably dull, because she had done all that she could desire to do.36 Critics have focused upon the contention that immortality must grow tedious, and have invented a host of admittedly shrewd and incisive distinctions to try to undercut Williams’s case.37 The main thrust of all the objections is cogently summed up by Roman Altshuler: “A man who knows perfectly well that we normally undergo a fair bit of change in our lives and that knowing this does not make continuing to live undesirable should not think that simply adding an indefinite number of such changes to our future must cancel out that desirability.”38 In other words, if immortality is just like mortality but without the ending, there is no reason why it must prove tedious if mortal life does not, and therefore Williams is wrong to conclude that it is not, in principle, desirable. Adam Buben adds ethical heft to this argument by maintaining that the work of life is not confined to the cultivation of specific talents and pastimes, but (following Kierkegaard) the ethical perfection of the person. Since this task can never be completed, an immortal life would never prove meaningless, because there would always be work on the self to do. “The work of self-development is recommended … because it can provide meaning and ‘momentum in life,’ even if life does not last long enough to achieve more concrete goals. What is most interesting for the present discussion, though, is the further implication that such work can continue infinitely long … that so long as one lives, one can never be a finished and perfect person.”39 Of all the critiques of Williams, Buben’s is, I think, the strongest, because it recognizes that life must have some ethical and existential substance to be meaningful and liveable, but in direct contrast to my position it posits that this substance would not drain out over an unlimited lifetime. I find the arguments that contend that we could always invent new, specific categorical desires unconvincing because they treat immortal life just like mortal life that goes on from one day to the next.

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Immortality, however, would not be a life that just goes on a long time, permitting greater scope for capacity development, but a qualitative change of the most radical sort imaginable. It seems inconceivable to me that I could become immortal tomorrow and retain the interests that I have formed as a mortal who expects to die in the next few decades. It seems equally impossible, psychologically, to desire to endlessly re-invent myself in relation to ever new projects whose substance would ultimately be meaningless, directed as they would be either to people who would die, and with whom I shared no bond, or to people who would not, and would thus need nothing from me. Work upon myself poses different issues. If I am oriented by the goal of making myself into a definite ethical person, with definite commitments that I want to live up to, but these commitments can never be perfectly realized, why could I not retain a vital interest in them over an unlimited time? Psychologically, I have no knock-down response to this argument. That is, I cannot cite any evidence that I would as a matter of psychological fact cease to find the struggle to perfect myself endlessly challenging and meaningful. What I might in fact do is not the same as what I ought to do according to philosophical principles thought out as clearly as I am capable of thinking them out. Thus, as thoughtful and serious as Buben’s argument is, I think it misses one crucial feature of the link between finitude and meaning that I have insisted upon. That feature is that so long as human beings are a social species, living on a planet with finite room and finite resources, it is necessary that we give way to future generations, not only so that they have resources and space to live (as Lucretius and Nussbaum also argued), but also so that there is something undone for them to do. One glaring omission of all the responses to Williams is that they discuss the immortality of an abstract individual whose immortality is achieved by magic, leaving everything else as it is in the world. The stakes change decisively if we imagine everyone immortal by virtue of some version of the technotopian program, for then there would be no reason to bring anyone new into the world, and the human project would, in effect, end with the immortals. No new life would ever come into the world again, no new potential centres of social self-conscious activity would be actualized, and that, from my perspective, is of less life-value than the alternative, which is our

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current reality, in which each contributes their share and then cedes their place to the absolutely new perspective that comes with each new life. The matter of a good individual life involves self-making, but not into every shape possible or conceivable. To be an individual is to have made oneself into this and not that, to have had to choose, irrevocably, between going here and going there, cultivating these talents and letting those lie fallow as a consequence, but also, in so doing, enabling, in small or large, direct or indirect ways, new life, which will contribute in its own ways to the ongoing human project. That which one individual does not or cannot do, others can. Social life is, viewed apart from whatever inequalities, power asymmetries, and structures of oppression and exploitation happen to exist, a sharing and pooling of different talents so that all that requires doing is done, all that is a potential object of experience is experienced, all that can be made beautifully by us is made, but by the whole, over an open-ended period of time. The ongoing elaboration of these goods of life, both through their positive realization and through successful social struggles against systematic barriers, constitutes the human historical project considered as a meaningful narrative. However, the fact that individual life is still, from the perspective of the species, limited means that there is a tragic element to life that cannot be ignored. As Santayana explains beautifully, materiality and temporality are inextricably linked to each other – material things necessarily come into being, develop over a period of time, and then cease to be. If you value being a human individual, you must value the body that makes you a human individual. If you value the body that makes you a human individual, you must value the temporal sequences through which that body necessarily develops. If you value the temporal sequences through which the body develops, you must value the end as well as the beginning, since endings are essential to that which begins. “An invitation to the dance is not rendered ironical because the dance cannot last for ever; the youngest of us and the most vigorously wound up, after a few hours, has had enough sinuous stepping and prancing. The transitoriness of things is essential to their physical being, and not at all sad in itself.”40 A dance that went on forever would not be enjoyed as a dance, a period of

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exuberant self-expression and relation marked off from other demands life places upon us. The good of any particular life is materially limited in the same way. A life that went on forever and could explore every possibility simply at will, a life in which no real choices had to be made, would lack any distinction from other lives, and would not be, in consequence, the human life the striver after immortality had hoped for. People must decide from the set of all persons they could conceivably become the one whom they will work to become and be. All life activity involves the non-alienated labour of determining which of the open-ended field of possibilities that lie before socially self-conscious agents will come to define one’s life. The intensity that charges a life well lived comes from the knowledge that each choice will lead in a direction from which one cannot ultimately return, and there is no way of knowing this before the choice is made. This essential uncertainty is what I called in chapter 2 our existential freedom. Without it, life would not be human; indeed, it would not be life but, as I said, programmed machine functioning. But now we can see that this existential freedom also presupposes death. That which makes us existentially free is the impossibility of knowing with certainty the identity we will build for ourselves. But this uncertainty is bound up with the temporal matrix within which our lives are led, and in particular with having a future. To have a future is to exist within a present that opens out into a possibility space whose content can never be known before one actually occupies it. But to live in relation to a future one cannot know is to be materially limited, and to be materially limited is to be temporally limited as well, i.e., to be mortal. But if existential freedom is essential to a meaningful life worth living, and mortality (temporal limitation) is essential to existential freedom, then so too is mortality essential to a meaningful life worth living. We feel this need for meaning and it pushes us to undertake the non-alienated labour that can produce it. The knowledge that we only have one chance for a meaningful life helps us endure the hardships so that we can at the end of life look back and ask whether we have succeeded or failed. As Ron Aronson argues, “dying … imparts into [our self-judgments] the urgency of a life that is irreversible and final.”41

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Were life reversible and endlessly revisable it might be fun (for a while) but it would lack meaning. In lacking meaning it would be devoid of the satisfactions proper to human life. The desire for immortality is a desire to extend infinitely the satisfactions that are proper to a human life. However, those satisfactions depend upon the material independence of things, the possibility of failure, and the finality of death. Although it still might sound counterintuitive, valuable individual lives must end in death. Death ends an individual life that cannot be replaced, and ensures that not all that it is conceivable to do to make individuality richer and society more free and just is in fact done. For these reasons there is a life tragic element to life.

chapter 6

Conclusion Tragedy and Life-Value Consciousness of our mortality is the most powerful motivation to give overall life-coherent order to our lives. Still, no matter how successful we are at shaping our lives into meaningful ethical wholes, they will end in death. Given the fact that life must end, the ethical wholeness of individual life never includes the realized totality of experiences and things it would (in principle and imagination) have been good for a particular person to do. Furthermore, at least at this point in history, even the most politically committed lives end with structures of oppression and injustice not fully overcome. Since we have the capacity to contemplate the totality of possibilities for experience and activity available to the species, and to imagine futures in which there is no oppression or injustice, it is always possible for us to compare in mind the ethical whole that we have made of our lives and the infinitely broader range of experiences and activities we could have had, had we more life time, and the better world that could be in the future that we might have seen had we lived longer. Since these widened experiences and better futures are good, death does impede one from realizing them. Since these are goods that no individual can ever experience but all can imagine experiencing, they illuminate a tragic element to mortal existence: we die before experiencing all the good it is possible to imagine enjoying. This tragic element in life is distinct from the Greek sense of tragedy insofar as it is not focused on the fate of a hero but concerns everyone. Still, there is a deeper connection between the philosophical implications of Greek tragedy and the tragic in life as I understand it. As Walter Kaufmann explains in his philosophical interpretation of Greek tragedy, its ethical significance lay in the clarity with which it presented how the “countless agonies” of life “belong to one great pattern.” By viewing tragedy, Kaufmann continues, “our lives gain

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form, and the pattern transcends us. We are not singled out; we belong to a great fraternity that includes some of mankind’s greatest heroes.”1 For Kaufmann, Greek tragedy instructed as to both the inevitability of suffering in human life and the individual’s ability to bear and transcend this suffering by recognizing that it is the shared condition of being human. Tragedies, he continues, make us feel that “suffering is no insuperable objection to life, that even the worst misfortunes are compatible with the greatest beauty. Far from being persuaded that life is not worth living and that we should leave the world, we are confirmed in our determination to hold out.”2 I do not think that all of life’s agonies belong to one great pattern, but I do think that understanding the necessity of the tragic element helps us bear the suffering caused by the knowledge that even the fullest life must end without all the good of life it is possible to conceive being realized. Although life must end in order to become whole, it also always ends too soon, because it removes the individual from the life in which alone it is possible to self-consciously realize that good. Nevertheless, if we were never to die, the ultimate goodness of individual life as an ethical whole would not be possible, and so death is ethically necessary. In the space between death’s ethical necessity and its cutting the individual off from the experience of any further goods lies the tragic element of life in my sense. This sense of tragedy is central to a certain reading of Christianity associated above all with Pascal. “There was formerly in man a real happiness,” he writes, “[but] there remains only the totally empty mark and trace of this happiness, which he tries in vain to fill with everything that surrounds him … but finding all incapable of that help, because that infinite abyss can be filled only by something infinite and immutable, that is to say, God himself.”3 Although he is not a materialist, Pascal’s understanding of the tragedy of life stems from confining his knowledge (in contrast to his faith) to the terms of earthly experience. “The tragic mind,” of which Pascal is the first modern philosophical example, according to Lucien Goldmann, “is constantly haunted by both hope and fear … [and is thus] forced to live in uninterrupted tension, without either knowing or accepting an instant of repose. But the absolute demand for theoretical and practical certainty also implies a second consequence: that man is

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alone, placed between a blind world and a hidden and a silent God.”4 Instead of answers, “all that the tragic man finds before him is the eternal silence of infinite space.”5 To ground the tragic element of life in a religion whose defining promise is eternal life might seem to contradict the whole materialist thrust of the argument of this book, but if we think of Christianity as an earthly philosophical-ethical disposition rather than a doctrine and promise of eternal life, the contradiction disappears. Christianity is rooted, ethically, in the tension between the inevitability of death and the primacy of love and life. Individuals are enjoined to prove the value of earthly life by loving their neighbours at the same time as they are constantly reminded (in Catholicism in any case) by the gruesome but all too human spectacle of Christ on the cross about where we are all headed, no matter how good we are. If we interpret heaven not as a real place in which the saved shall be reincarnated, but as an idea of perfect fulfillment and justice which is beyond human powers to experience in any actual earthly moment, then its contribution to the sense of the tragic element of life as I read it from my materialist ethical perspective becomes clear: the individual while alive on earth is forever cut off from the perfection, individual or political, he or she is able to imagine. The tragedy at the heart of Christian earthly ethics really only becomes clear from the materialist standpoint because the materialist god is not only hidden (as in Pascal) but non-existent. Yet this materialist ethical problematic is not absent from Pascal. As a living body, all that he knows is that he has been born and will die. In between he feels a longing for an absolute totality of understanding, experience, and justice that the world cannot provide in any finite timeframe. For Pascal, the void between the mortal whole he can make himself into and the infinite perfection he can imagine is filled by faith, a solution to which materialist ethics cannot appeal. Nevertheless, it can learn from the desire for an absolute totality of understanding, experience, and justice the meaning (and, we will see, the life-value) of this tragic element of life. To put the point somewhat differently, for the living individual the tragic element arises from a conflict between the intellect and what it knows about the limits of finite life, on the one hand, and the

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desire for life on the other. Another Catholic thinker, Miguel de Unamuno, expresses this dimension of the problem clearly. This is the definition given to the tragic sense of life by Unamuno: “Living is one thing and knowing another; and, as we shall see, perhaps there is such an opposition between the two that we may say that everything vital is anti-rational, not merely irrational, and everything rational is anti-vital. And that is the tragic sense of life.”6 Although he starts from the same logical space as Pascal (the intellectual grasp of life’s finitude and the lover of life’s desire for it to continue forever), he identifies himself, unlike Pascal (and eccentrically, for a Catholic), as a materialist. He argues (and I agree) that the tragic element of life is a necessary entailment of a materialist position. “Materialism you say? Materialism? Without doubt; but either our spirit is likewise some kind of matter or it is nothing. I dread the idea of having to tear myself away from my flesh; I dread still more the idea of having to tear myself away from everything sensible and material, from all substance … if I grapple myself to God with all my powers and all my senses, it is that He may carry me in His arms beyond death.”7 Unamuno does not want to be carried to a tranquil nirvana, nor a disembodied transcendence of the flesh. He demands life always be like it is when it is good on earth, that the pleasures of the man of “flesh and bone” last forever. “I am the centre of my universe, the centre of the universe … Egoism, you say? There is nothing more universal than the individual … each man is worth more than the whole of humanity.”8 He knows that this desire cannot be fulfilled, but rather than give it up, he sacrifices his knowledge for faith in the impossible: that God will restore to him the life of which death will deprive him. Hence he is correct to assign the name materialism to the ontoethics he preaches – the good he desires is the good of the flesh, but without its frailties. Materialist ethics does not accept Unamuno’s leap of faith by which he transcends materialist tragedy with the hope for resurrection. Instead, it remains within the earthly truth that life must end before the person can become an absolute totality in a perfectly just world. If it were or became possible to complete every project, to become an absolute totality of self-realizing activity in a world completely just, life would not be tragic. However, if it were not tragic, it would not be

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life, and if it were not life it would not have the beauty and value that it does have and that makes us desire to live forever. The tragic element of life, like death, is inescapable, but also, like death, a condition of life’s goodness, not its negation. There is also a political dimension to the tragic element in life. Here too fulfilment in seeing justice fully realized is impossible. History is a history of oppression and struggles against oppression. Tens of millions of human beings have died as a consequence of pogroms, massacres, and unjust wars. Those who have been killed can never be restored to consciousness. No future freedom can redeem their suffering. In the present, one can always imagine doing something more to alleviate ongoing misery, just as one can always imagine another experience that it would be good to have, all the while knowing that one’s time to contribute will run out. Religion has tried to close the tragic distance between commitment to the good of all and the reality of unnecessary suffering. Nevertheless, it remains a fact that politically committed individuals will die before experiencing the absolute justice to which they have devoted their lives. Ivan Karamazov, reasoning in a way analogous to Unamuno, demands immortality just because it is the only way the suffering of the unjustly killed could be redeemed, and if it cannot be redeemed, his own and everyone else’s life will be ruined by guilt. “I must have justice,” Ivan insists. And not justice in some remote infinite time and space, but here on earth, and that I would see it for myself … If I am dead by then, then let me rise again, for if it happens without me, it would be too unfair. Surely I have not suffered simply that I, my crimes and sufferings, may manure the soil of future harmony for somebody else. I want to see with my own eyes the hind lie down with the lion and the victim rise up and embrace his murderer. I want to be there when everybody suddenly understands what it has all been for. All the religions of the world are built on this longing.9 Karamazov’s demand simply emphasizes the politically tragic element of earthly life. There will be no absolute justice here. In the absence of heaven, we must conclude that there is no overcoming the tragedy

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that some lives are destroyed by the forces of oppression and there is nothing that can be done to redeem the lost life. What does materialist ethics conclude about the tragic element of political life? Marcuse, reflecting on the problem, concludes that it is impossible to make good the harm of dying “in agony and pain,” which proves that human history is stained by an “unredeemable guilt of mankind.”10 However, this conclusion is far too abstract. Guilt and responsibility are bound up with each other. We are guilty only in relation to that for which we are responsible, and we are responsible only for what we have the causal power to change. If the structures of oppression run so deep that they cannot be completely transformed in the amount of time even the most committed individuals and groups have to devote to the cause, then those individuals and groups are not responsible for the failure of their struggles to fully succeed. Our guilt extends as far as our failure to exercise the capacities we do in fact have; no one is guilty for not being able to finish a job well begun but whose demands exceed one’s lifetime. Not to contribute to the struggle against alienation and oppression when one has the time and means to contribute is a failure worthy of moral censure, but not to succeed is no crime. The goal of every individual life in this dimension is to play the part that one can play and to contribute to the permanence of the struggle, to keep it going so that future generations might succeed where a present generation has failed. This attitude of constant constructive engagement is distinct from the attitude of faith, even though it has its roots in the same experience of the tragic element of life. From the materialist ethical standpoint the problem with faith – whether religious or, as in the case of the technotopians, in technology – is that both ultimately flee from the tragedy they diagnose. That is, they disengage from the problems on the terrain where they might be ameliorated, if not ultimately resolved. Karamazov demands heaven and Kurzweil a transcendent supercomputer, but both flee the day-to-day reality of the social and political causes of oppression and alienation, as well as the existential need to affirm life-coherent limits to individual desires, demands, and activities. Neither the believer in heaven nor the believer in the singularity can accept the limits whose acceptance is the only real means to reconciliation with the life of the flesh. Reconciliation with

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the life of the flesh is the only real means to fulfillment in the life that we have. Atul Gawande reminds us in his meditation on death, discussed in chapter 4, that “the curve of life” is necessarily “a long, slow fade” to black.11 However, the downward curve implies the necessity of a preceding upward curve. If there were no death there would have been no development or maturation either. I am reminded here again of Stevens’s “Sunday Morning.” He reminds us that if there were no death, there would be no beauty, because there would be no development towards ripeness and fulfillment. The fruit is most delicious at the moment of maximal ripeness, but it is ripening in order to fall off the tree and die so as to spread its seeds and ensure the emergence of new life. If there is no death, there is no ripeness, and no new life: “But in contentment I still feel The need of some imperishable bliss.” Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams And our desires. Although she strews the leaves Of sure obliteration on our paths, That path sick sorrow took, the many paths Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love Whispered a little out of tenderness, She makes the willow shiver in the sun For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet.12 Stevens grasps the fundamental problem clearly: the good is fulfillment, but fulfillment presupposes directional development, and directional development terminates in endings, in death, and that is tragic. We can imagine a paradise in which “there is no change of death,” in which “ripe fruit never fall,” but a moment’s reflection – poetic or philosophical – will remind us that ripe fruit must fall.13 If they do not they are not ripe, and if they never ripen, they are not fruit. Death does not negate the value of the life that led up to it. On the contrary, dying is the condition without which we would not be able to give an overall shape, purpose, and identity to our lives. Without

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it, we would not be able to have others recognize that something of real, objective, and unique value is lost when we die. The good of individual life comes with a time stamp. If it went on forever, it would not be good, and in any case, it cannot go on forever, because the usable energy of the universe will one day have been used up. Physics concurs with philosophy: all that comes to be must pass away, and sooner or later each reflective individual must accept this truth and value their own temporary existence appropriately. We value it appropriately by working to make our lives into ethical wholes. Ethical wholeness is achieved by the reflective unification of the meaning potentially present in each moment of life-coherent experience and activity. At the end of such a life one can say that it mattered, it made a difference, it had a purpose; without it the human project would not have been advanced in the way that it was. This capacity to shape our identity through life-valuable response to the demands of the situation and to reflectively discover its unified meaning elevates human life above mere biological functioning. People become who they are through the projects that originate with the decisions they make, decisions that are made under the ontological pressure that finitude and finality generate. It is not possible for a finite person to enjoy infinite experiences and activities. Hence, people must choose the trails they will blaze, and through these choices they each become the person they end up being. Hedonists will object that the demand to restrict individual desires by consideration of the life-requirements of others and the carrying capacity of the natural world is oppressive and contrary to the good of the individual. Such egotism explicitly underlies the demand for transcendence of the finality of death. But acting on the egocentric principle, as an individual dependent upon nature and interdependent with others in society, will generate patterns of social behaviour that threaten the conditions of ongoing life and thus contradict the goal of living as long and as pleasurably as possible as a real human being on earth. Good life even as a hedonist requires connection to nature and others, and these connections demand selflimiting choices. The pessimists for their part do not deny the need for connection to nature and others but regard both as ties that undermine life’s

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value. They believe that if life cannot go on forever it would better for everyone if they were never born. Unlike egocentrism, which constantly tempts most people, at least in liberal-capitalist society, their views are almost universally disregarded: people continue to reproduce and nurture the young, and the young, as they mature, do not regret being born but embrace life and contribute to the manifold ways in which it can be made meaningful. For the most part people do not curse their mortality but pour their energies into living intensely while they are alive. In this way of living a deep truth is spoken: the intensity of a life well lived follows from its finitude. Consciousness of this ultimate frame of finitude – death – is the final motivation for people to strive to make their lives into meaningful wholes. The universal human goal is to make one’s life into an ethical whole against the backdrop of inevitable death. Consciousness of the inescapability of death is thus the ultimate condition of our becoming and desiring to become someone unique, specific, and whole. Death is not an existential injustice but a frame outside of which our lives would not be the meaningful wholes that we strive to make them. Far from imprisoning us within our own egos, acceptance of life’s finitude opens us out to the world – to its beauty, to its injustices – so that we might act so as to experience for ourselves what is beautiful and joyous, fight against that which is unjust. In that way we serve happiness and justice simultaneously and then leave it to the subsequent generations to complete the buildings we leave unfinished. At the same time, it remains true that death permanently subtracts unique individuals whom others cared about from the ranks of the existent. This loss is real, it is permanent, and it is painful. Losses hurt because we love others not as mere assemblages of proteins, but as unique, irreplaceable individuals. Our tears strengthen the more deeply we feel and understand the permanence of the loss death causes. Each tear is an argument for the value of the life that has been lived, but also for the tragedy in which every particular life ends. We might imagine that the world would be better without our tears, but that is tantamount to saying that the world would be better without real love, without self-transforming attachments and relationships, without the risk of caring about others as much as or more than we care about ourselves, without change, without a future that offers life space and

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time to new people to live, love, struggle, forge relationships, and create and enjoy life-value for themselves, the circle of their relations, and the future that keeps extending beyond every generation. Hence, there is no life without limitation. If the limitations that define our finitude are not to undermine our love of life, their essential connection to life’s goodness must be understood. Their essential connection to life’s goodness is understood as soon as we understand them as the motivations for the non-alienated experience and work through which we create ourselves as specific individuals whose lives made a difference to the order of things. We make our lives into the ethical wholes that we become, and that production is self-determination, freedom.

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Notes

pre fac e 1 McMurtry, Philosophy and World Problems, 1:213. i nt roduct io n 2 The phrase “core human capacities” might remind some readers of Martha Nussbaum’s “capabilities approach to social justice.” There is some overlap between Nussbaum’s arguments and my own, but the differences far outweigh the similarities, despite the near synonymy of some of the terminology. I explain the differences in detail in Noonan, Materialist Ethics and Life-Value, 205–10. 3 “Transhumanist faq,” revision 3.0, Humanity+, accessed 9 August 2013, http://humanityplus.org/philosophy/transhumanist-faq/. 4 McMurtry, “Breaking Out of the Invisible Prison.” c ha pt er o ne 1 Marcuse et al., “Theory and Politics,” 136. 2 McMurtry, Philosophy and World Problems, 1:213. In chapter 4 I will add to these elements of a good life the capacity for mutualistic relationship and devotion to the good of individual and collective others. 3 Innocent III, On the Misery of the Human Condition, 24–5. 4 Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 4. 5 Nagel, “The Absurd,” 17. 6 Job, 2:11–14 (Moffat New Translation). 7 Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, 109. 8 To allude to the title of another powerful tale of a good life rapidly becoming its opposite, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. 9 John Milton, Paradise Lost, 332. 10 Ibid., 332–3. 11 Ibid., 334–5.

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39 40 41 42

Notes to pages 17–37

Ibid., 311. Ibid., 333. Leopardi, “To Count Carlo Pepoli,” 53. Horkheimer, “Schopenhauer Today,” 73. Schopenhauer, “On the Sufferings of the World,” 1. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 2:574. Schopenhauer, “On the Sufferings of the World,” 3. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 2:465. Ibid., 2:508. Schopenhauer, “Immortality: A Dialogue,” 35. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 2:508. Ibid., 2:559. Baruchello, “Notes on Pessimism,” 150. Benatar, “Why It Is Better Never to Come into Existence,” 350. Benatar, Better Never to Have Been, 29. Benatar, “The Wrong of Wrongful Life,” 179. Benatar, Better Never to Have Been, 44. Ibid., 212–13. Ibid., 40. Bradley, “Benatar and the Logic of Betterness,” 4. Benatar, Better Never to Have Been, 86. Doyal, “Is Human Existence Worth Its Consequent Harm?,” 575. DeGrazia, “Is It Wrong to Impose the Harms of Human Life?,” 326. Smilansky, “Review of David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been,” 570. Quoted in McKirahan, Philosophy before Socrates, 121. McMurtry, Philosophy and World Problems, 1:52. Ramzy Baroud, “An Open Letter to Young Muslims Everywhere: The Seed of Triumph in Every Adversity,” Antiwar.com, 31 December 2015, accessed 15 January 2016, http://original.antiwar.com/ramzybaroud/2015/12/30/an-open-letter-to-young-muslims-everywhere-theseed-of-triumph-in-every-adversity/. Freire, Education for Critical Consciousness, 94. McMurtry, Philosophy and World Problems, 1:10. McMurtry, “Human Rights versus Corporate Rights,” 35. As Schopenhauer in fact argues. See The World as Will and Representation, 2:531–60. He was preceded in this view by Hegel, who argued

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that from the perspective of nature, living individuals are valuable only insofar as they help perpetuate the species. See Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, 106–8. 43 Durkheim, Selected Writings, 113. There is another form of suicide, which I will call, following Camus, “philosophical,” which stems from a deep rational reflection on one’s life leading to the justified conclusion that there is no longer room for growth, development, contribution, and enjoyment. In this case suicide results from the rational decision to bring one’s own life to a close because further life would be mere biological functioning without objective or subjective value. Philosophical suicide raises practical ethical questions about what would count as a “rational” reason for suicide, whether there should be a right to euthanasia, and what the proper role of a medical professional in end-of-life decisions should be. These are all important questions, but they fall outside the scope of this inquiry. 44 Milton, Paradise Lost, 335.

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cha pt er two Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, 302. As my former student James Steinhoff brilliantly (but to my mind erroneously) argues in “Transhumanism and Marxism,” 1–16. Srnicek and Williams, Inventing the Future, 82. Bostrom, “Transhumanist Values,” 4. Bostrom, “Dignity and Enhancement,” 7. For example, Nicolas Agar, one of the most cogent defenders of liberal eugenics, accepts the legitimacy of therapeutic genetic treatments and enhancement of typical human capacities for thought and action, but draws the line at the creation of entirely new capacities that would in effect make biological human beings obsolete. He distinguishes liberal eugenics from earlier and morally problematic forms by claiming that liberal eugenics is rooted in individual consumer choice, while earlier forms of eugenics were state controlled and objectionable, not because they tried to improve the species, but because they were practised on people without their consent. See Agar, Humanity’s End, 17–33. Glover, What Sorts of People Should There Be?, 56. The transhumanists consciously insert themselves as the realization of

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this historical struggle against disease and death. The term “transhumanist” was first coined in 1927 by the biologist Julian Huxley. For a historical overview of the development of the transhumanist movement see Bostrom, “A History of Transhumanist Thought.” Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations, 48. Quoted in Bostrom, “A History of Transhumanist Thought,” 26. More, “The Philosophy of Transhumanism,” 4. These four vulnerabilities of human life are similar, but not identical to, the four classes of human finitude that I will examine in chapter 3. I conceived of the four classes of finitude as I examined the technotopian arguments against biological life. However, as I developed the argument that the forms of finitude enabled the forms of non-alienated labour which are essential to the production of the goods of human life, I realized that the forms of non-alienated labour went beyond what could be explained by the technotopian understanding of what is wrong with biological life. Hence the difference between the problems of biology discussed here and the classes of finitude discussed as positive conditions of good human lives in chapter 3. Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near, 127. Moravec, Robot, 166. Briefly, functionalism in the philosophy of mind refers to the claim that consciousness is a function of network organization and interaction, not the material composition of the network. If it is true, it means that there is no material barrier to the creation of true artificial intelligences, but only technical barriers to creating the proper type of distributed processing systems. For the functionalist, there is nothing special about the biochemistry of brains that makes them conscious; consciousness is a function of neural architecture, which can in principle be recreated using non-biological materials. The best-known functionalist is Daniel Dennett. See Dennett, Consciousness Explained. For a more recent version of his central argument see Dennett, Sweet Dreams. J.P. Dupuy and F. Roure, quoted in Beland and Patenaude, “Risk and the Question of the Acceptability of Human Enhancement,” 381. Pearce, The Hedonistic Imperative. Hughes, Citizen Cyborg, 233.

Notes to pages 47–55

19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

32 33 34

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Oskvig, “Harder, Faster, Stronger—Better,” 6. Savulescu, “New Breeds of Humans,” 38. Glover, What Sorts of People Should There Be?, 31. Oftentimes, there are not even any real gains to be had in exotic treatments but only advertising hype to create markets and money, as some scientists, concerned that the public is being misled about what is medically possible, are now warning. See Kelly Crow, “It’s Not Just Stem Cell Research That’s Overhyped – Medical Science Spin Is a Widespread Problem,” cbc, 18 May 2016, accessed 3 August 2016, http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/stem-cell-science-hype-1.3582223. Jackson, “The Amorality of Preference,” 6. Silver, Remaking Eden, 11. Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near, 35–6. More, “The Principles of Extropy.” Ibid. Bostrom, “Dignity and Enhancement,” 20. Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near, 96. Ibid., 339. Barack Obama quoted in Miller, “Taking Notes 30.” For Obama’s full remarks see “Remarks by the President on the brain Initiative and American Innovation,” The White House, 2 April 2013, accessed 10 December 2013, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/ 2013/04/02/remarks-president-brain-initiative-and-americaninnovation. de Grey, Ending Aging, 377. Ibid., 30. Live Long Enough to Live Forever is the subtitle of a book by Kurzweil and Terry Grossman, and endorsed by de Grey. See Kurzweil and Grossman, Fantastic Voyage. Moravec, Robot, 167–8. Bostrom, “Dignity and Enhancement,” 30. Bostrom, “A History of Transhumanist Thought,” 18. Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near, 374. Sebastiano Timpanaro argues, for example, that Marxist materialism is incompatible with the “culturalist” belief that human beings are nothing more than the sum total of changeable social, historical,

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technological, and cultural conditions. The human body is the site of capacities and vulnerabilities that do not vary fundamentally across history. See Timpanaro, On Materialism. Sandel, The Case against Perfection, 27. Ibid., 46. Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future, 149. Bostrom, “In Defence of Posthuman Dignity,” 2. Kass, Beyond Therapy, 292. Mitchell, Cloud Atlas, 343. Ibid. Césaire, Discours sur le colonialisme, 23 Moravec, Robot, 189. Annas, Andrews, and Issi, “Protecting the Endangered Human,” 151–78. Hughes, Citizen Cyborg, 210–12; Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near, 373. The trajectory and structural causes of this growing inequality have been expertly demonstrated in Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Agar, Liberal Eugenics, 5 Habermas, The Future of Human Nature, 61. See, for example, Bostrom, “In Defence of Posthuman Dignity,” 9. Agacinski, Corps en miettes, 45. “Une réserve de tissue, de cellules et d’organes, quantifiable et utilisable à volonté … Et l’enfant lui-même peut deviens un produit fabrique, au risque d’effacer le différence entre une personne et une chose” (my translation). Mies and Bennholdt-Thomsen, The Subsistence Perspective, 38. Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 485. Sandel, The Case against Perfection, 15–19. Hughes, Citizen Cyborg, 239. On the political and economic challenges of public health care systems meeting rising health care needs see for example the so-called Drummond Report, a comprehensive review of public spending in Ontario. While the particular conclusions and recommendations of the report can be challenged, the structural problem of meeting everrising demand with finite public revenue is real. Ontario, Commission on Reform of Ontario’s Public Service.

Notes to pages 65–76

61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74

75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83

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Agar, Humanity’s End, 162. Bentham, The Principles of Morals and Legislation, 312–13. Edgeworth, Mathematical Psychics, 15. Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near, 102. Dvorsky, “Better Living through Transhumanism,” 2. Jackson, “The Amorality of Preference,” 3. Plato, Republic, 242–50 (571c–580). Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near, 389. 1 Corinthians, 15:44 (Moffat New Translation). Pearce, The Hedonistic Imperative. Noddings, Caring, 99. Lefebvre, The Critique of Everyday Life, 731. McKibben, Enough, 48. McMurtry, Philosophy and World Problems, 1:269. Glover is also sensitive to this difference between external mechanism and lived meaning, but he does not see the contradiction between the affirmation of the meaningfulness of inner, felt life and the genetic reprogramming of human beings that he supports. See Glover, Choosing Children, 91. Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near, 293. Savulescu, “New Breeds of Humans,” 37. Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life, 112. Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near, 296. Arendt, The Human Condition, 178. Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 34. Jonas, “Biological Engineering,” 164. McMurtry, Philosophy and World Problems, 1:184. Bostrom, “The Superintelligent Will,” 14.

c ha pte r three 1 The rule of Lesbos, discussed by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics, molded itself to the shape it was measuring (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1020, 1137b30). So too does time experienced as an open matrix of possibilities: the consummation or fulfillment of the activity or experience determines the time given over to it. I will return to a discussion of the relationship between time experienced as free and lifevaluable experience and activity in section 3.2.

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2 As I have discussed elsewhere and in detail the objective political and social dimension of the struggle for the experience of time as free, I will have relatively more to say here about the subjective, philosophical dimension of the problem. See Noonan, “Socialism as a LifeCoherent Society”; Noonan, Materialist Ethics and Life Value; Noonan, “What Does Revolution Mean Today?”; Noonan, “Selfconstraint, Human Freedom, and the Conditions of Socialist Democracy,” 85–101; Noonan, “Preservative Struggles in the Age of Austerity.” 3 See Marx, Outline of a Critique of Political Economy, 250. 4 Rosa, Social Acceleration, 306. In addition to Marx, Rosa is also importantly influenced by the work of Reinhardt Koselleck. See Koselleck, Future’s Past. 5 Rosa, Social Acceleration, 317–18. 6 Adam, Timewatch, 52. 7 Wajcman, Pressed for Time, 107. 8 Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, 275. 9 Crary, 24/7, 29–30. 10 Ibid., 124. 11 “Intern Death Leads to Bank Review,” Toronto Star, 24 August 2013, A2. 12 Wajcman, Pressed for Time, 103. 13 Mustard, Lavis, and Ostry, “Work and Health,” 173–201. The following discussion of the physiology of stress and its deleterious impacts on health has benefitted greatly from discussions of this research with Josephine Watson, rn, mscn. 14 Dennis Campbell, “uk Needs Four-Day Week to Combat Stress, Says Top Doctor,” The Guardian, 1 July 2014, accessed 11 August 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/jul/01/uk-four-day-weekcombat-stress-top-doctor. 15 Sterling and Eyer, “Allostasis,” 641. 16 Sennett, The Corrosion of Character, 25. 17 Ibid., 98. 18 Ibid., 139. 19 Hochschild, The Time Bind, 197. 20 Ibid., 192. 21 Ibid., 212.

Notes to pages 87–99

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Wajcman, Pressed for Time, 75. Gumbrecht, Our Broad Present, 68. Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, 277. Gumbrecht, Our Broad Present, 25. Casey, “Between Geography and Philosophy,” 688. Virilio, The Administration of Fear, 73. Wajcman, Pressed for Time, 104 Levitin, The Organized Mind, 7. Ibid. Ibid., 170. Ibid., 183. Sandel, Against Perfection, 58. Fraysee, “How the US Counterculture Redefined Work for the Age of the Internet,” 30–51. Hassan, “Network Time,” 51. Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 44–5. Ibid., 45. Osborne, The Politics of Time, 200. Boggs, afterword to The Next American Revolution, 197. I have discussed the broad history of this struggle elsewhere, but I did not examine in any detail its more recent developments. See Noonan, “Free Time as a Condition of Free Human Life”; Noonan, Democratic Society and Human Needs; and Noonan, Materialist Ethics and Life Value. Schor, The Overworked American, 78. Ibid., 13. Ibid., 115. See Gorz, Critique of Economic Reason. See Aronowitz and Cutler, Post-Work; Victor, Managing without Growth; Shippen, Decolonizing Time; Schor, Plenitude; Srnicek and William, Inventing the Future; Gindin and Hurley, “Work Overload.” Schor, Plenitude, 20. Peter Victor, “Computer Models,” Managing without Growth, accessed 31 July 2015, http://www.managingwithoutgrowth.com/ Computer_Models.html. I have discussed at length elsewhere these general goals as the foundations of a revivified socialist project. Since the main aims of this book

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are existential and ethical, elaborating on them further or delving into the tactical and strategic discussion their realization would require would be a digression. Interested readers can consult the arguments in Noonan, “What Does Revolution Mean Today,” and Noonan, “After Occupy.” This danger became evident quite early in the history of modern consumer capitalism. Henri Lefebvre alerted Marxists to the alienating effects of leisure in the foreword to the second edition of his Critique of Everyday Life, first published in 1961. Lefebvre, The Critique of Everyday Life, 61. Shippen, Decolonizing Time, 98. Ibid., 173. Srnicek and Williams, Inventing the Future, 123. Martineau, Time, Capitalism, and Alienation, 130. Shippen, Decolonizing Time, 177. I just made this example up, but as I was editing the text I remembered a brilliant film that I saw a few years ago about the Brazilian artist Vik Muniz and his work with people who worked as informal recyclers on the vast piles of garbage in São Paulo. They are far more articulate defenders of the dignity and life-value of their work than I am. Anyone skeptical of my example should listen to their stories and then reassess their criticism. An overview of the film, Waste Land, can be found at http://www.wastelandmovie.com/vik-muniz.html (accessed 25 May 2016). Dyer-Witherford, “A Reply to Michael Albert,” 326. Sharzer, No Local, 21. Harvey, Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism, 295. Perkins, “Out of Time,” 369. Kasser and Sheldon, “Time Affluence as a Path Toward Personal Happiness,” 252. Ibid. Salleh, Ecofeminism as Politics, 139. Gros, A Philosophy of Walking, 38. Ibid., 37. Ibid. Sharzer, No Local, 51.

Notes to pages 109–27

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67 Davies, “The Tensions between Process Time and Clock Time,” 277–303. 68 Ibid., 281 69 Ibid., 279. 70 Ibid. 71 Ibid., 298. 72 Lyotard, The Inhuman, 111. cha pte r fo ur 1 Mann, The Magic Mountain, 104. 2 For a discussion of the role urban agriculture has played in restoring communities in the United States, especially Detroit, see Boggs, The Next American Revolution. 3 Shiva, Making Peace with the Earth, 132. 4 Dussel, “The Bread of the Eucharist Celebration,” 41. 5 Marx, Capital, 3:820. 6 Jonas, Philosophical Essays, 197. 7 McMurtry, What Is Good, What Is Bad, 243. 8 Descartes, “The Passions of the Soul,” 350. For Aristotle’s position see Aristotle, “Metaphysics,” 689 (980a23). Aristotle notes that we delight in the exercise of our senses even apart from their instrumental value, and I agree. My point is not that wonder cannot be intrinsically valuable – simply taking pleasure in the awesome scale of the universe and the astounding variety of things within it. My point is that we take this delight as living participants in the material universe, not as “autopotent” generators of our own reality. 9 Descartes, “Passions of the Soul,” 349. 10 Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near, 145. 11 Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations, 100. 12 Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory, 255. In Materialist Ethics and Life-Value I cited the first part of the 1977 quip as part of an argument that helped distinguish materialist ethics from scientific naturalism. While the difference remains, perhaps Weinberg is not the onedimensional exponent of the later that I presented him to be. For the original discussion see Noonan, Materialist Ethics and Life-Value, 20. 13 Gawande, Being Mortal, 149.

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14 Singer, Meaning in Life, 1:88–9. 15 Antonovsky, Unravelling the Mystery of Health, 5–6. 16 Pender, “Medicine.” The article has not yet been published. The quotation is from the author’s typescript version of the article, used with his permission. 17 Stevens, “Anglais Mort à Florence,” 148–9. 18 Goethe, “The Diary,” 115. 19 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 171. 20 Seneca, Moral Essays, 1:26–8. 21 Antonovsky, Unravelling the Mystery of Health, 5–6. 22 World Health Organization, Closing the Gap in a Generation, 1. 23 Stuckler and Basu, The Body Economic, 25. 24 World Health Organization, Closing the Gap in a Generation, 7. 25 Stuckler and Basu’s cross-cultural studies have proved that cutting socialized medicine in response to imf and finance capital demands for austerity have devastating health impacts wherever they have been imposed. The evidence they present in support of their conclusion is overwhelming: economic crisis alone does not lead to higher mortality and morbidity, but austerity and the cutting of public health programs always have. See Stuckler and Basu, The Body Economic. 26 World Health Organization, Closing the Gap in a Generation, 1. 27 Mikkonen and Raphael, Social Determinants of Health, 12. 28 If you are in Oslo skip the crowds surrounding The Scream at the Munch Museum and stand alone in front of this powerful work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sick_Child#/media/File:Munch DaskrankeMaedchen.JPG (accessed 14 July 2014). 29 Camus, The Plague, 105–6. 30 Ibid., 105. 31 Ibid., 178. 32 Noddings, Caring, 65. 33 Fineman, The Autonomy Myth, 263. I would argue – were it my purpose to fully analyze Fineman’s argument – that what she calls “dependency” is better understood by the materialist ethical conception of interdependency. However, my intent is only to use her argument about the undervaluing of caring labour in capitalist society as a component of the overall position I am constructing. 34 Quoted in Segal, Out of Time, 132.

Notes to pages 139–66

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Ibid., 179. Plato, The Republic, 3 (329c–d). Scheffler, Death and the Afterlife, 46. Overall, Aging, Death, and Human Longevity, 20. Singer, Meaning in Life, 2:7. Segal, Out of Time, 28. Stevens, “Sunday Morning,” 69. cha pte r fi v e See Noonan, Materialist Ethics and Life-Value, 145–9. Singer, Meaning in Life, 2:140. Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, 326. Singer, Meaning in Life, 2:134–5. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 538–9. Badiou, In Praise of Love, 32. Turkle, Alone Together, 65. Ibid., 55–6. Ibid., 285. Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation, 348. Aurelius, Meditations, 92. Seneca, Moral Essays, 1:15. Aurelius, Meditations, 91. Spinoza, The Ethics, 219. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 252. Moller, “Love and Death,” 307. Segal, Out of Time, 117. MacLeod, No Great Mischief, 283. Spinoza, The Ethics, 158. For a very fortunate few, paid employment and their non-alienated labour of self-realization coincide. Modell, Imagination and the Meaningful Brain, 91. Storr, Solitude, 63. Beckett, “Worstward Ho,” 89. Motherwell, “Statement, 1947,” 57. Virilio, The Futurism of the Instant, 86. Motherwell, “On the Humanism of Abstraction,” 255. Goethe, “Nature and Art,” 83.

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28 Kant, The Critique of Judgment, 168. 29 It follows from this definition of beautiful art that not all art is properly judged by the aesthetics of the beautiful. Much great art is also concerned with formal experimentation and invention and with the provocative shattering of culturally prevalent ideas of what art can be. The two need not be mutually exclusive, but nor must all formal experimentation be beautiful in order to be art. My interest here, however, is not to comment on the history of art, but to articulate what it is about the practice of artistic creation that makes it exemplary of the more general human struggle to express its ideas in objective form. 30 Peck, Affirming Limits, 28. 31 Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 73. 32 Scarry, The Body in Pain, 286. 33 Peck, Affirming Limits, 79. 34 Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, 276. 35 Mays, “Answers,” 14. 36 Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension, 9. 37 Bentham, The Principles of Morals and Legislation, 312–13. 38 Scheffler, Death and the Afterlife, 22. 39 Ibid., 27. 40 Ibid., 59. 41 Wolf, Meaning in Life and Why It Matters, 62. 42 Ibid., 9. 43 May, A Significant Life, 136. 44 Ibid., 157. 45 McMurtry, “Breaking Out of the Invisible Prison.” 46 Norman Geras brilliantly explores an extended version of this thought experiment in The Contract of Mutual Indifference. 47 Plato, Republic, 274–7 (574d–577d). c hap t er si x 1 In my first systematic attempt to think about death from a materialist ethical standpoint I made a stronger claim than I will make here. I argued that death, understood both as the permanent cessation of all biological and creative activity and as the thought of the inevitability of that end, had positive life-value. Upon reflection I realize that I

Notes to pages 181–3

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tried to make too strong a case for the life-value of death. What I was groping towards was the position I will defend here, which is not that death has positive life-value for the person who dies, but that it is the most fundamental constitutive frame of human life. As the most fundamental constitutive frame of human life it can be, if properly understood, the prime motivation to live well as an individual, and the basic material condition ensuring that as many people as possible live well over the open-ended future of the human species. Death is the fundamental condition of the value of life, such that, were it somehow conquered, as the technotopians dream, life-value would be undermined, not made unlimited. Nevertheless, death remains a frame in which life-value is produced, not itself a positive life-value, as I first argued. See Noonan, “The Life-Value of Death,” 1–23. Overall, Aging, Death, and Human Longevity, 24. Nagel, “Death,” 78. For its subsequent elaborations see Feldman, Confrontations with the Reaper, 139–40; Rosenberg, Thinking Clearly about Death, xviii; Callahan, The Troubled Dream of Life, 84; Collins, “The Deprivation Account of Death’s Badness”; Ben Bradley, “When Is Death Bad for the One Who Dies?” The first version might be in Ecclesiastes: “Anyone still alive has something to live for (even a live dog is better than a dead lion); the living know this at least, that they must die. But the dead know nothing, they have nothing for their labour, their very memory is forgotten, their love has vanished with their hate and jealousy, and they have no share now in anything that goes on in this world.” Ecclesiastes 9:5 (Moffat New Translation). I discovered this passage of remarkable beauty through reading Dan Moller’s article on mourning, discussed in chapter 3. Heidegger, Being and Time, 294. Scheffler, Death and the Afterlife, 85–6. Epicurus, “Letter to Menoeceus,” 23. Rosenberg makes an analogous argument: the fear of death is irrational since fear requires a subject to fear an object, and death is the negation of the subject of fear. “One’s own death … is not, in point of logic, an event which one can oneself experience, nor even … an event which one can imagine oneself experiencing.” With all due respect to logic, people continue to fear death precisely because they can

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imagine all too well a world that continues while they are absent. That is what it means to imagine one’s own death – not absolute void, but the existence of the world without one’s presence in it. Rosenberg, Thinking Clearly about Death, 310. Larkin, “Aubade.” Fairfield, Death, 29. Rilke, Duino Elegies, 40–1. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 36. Durkheim, Selected Writings, 113. McMurtry, “Winning the War of the World,” 10. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 236–7. For my previous discussion see Materialist Ethics and Life-Value, 77–8. 1 Corinthians 15:32–3. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 40–2; Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, 297–302; Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 199–200. Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe, 91. Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire, 223. Laura Kane, “Linden MacIntyre Retiring to Save Jobs for Young Journalists at cbc,” Toronto Star, 8 May 2014, accessed 14 May 2014, http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/television/2014/05/ 08/linden_macintyre_retiring_to_save_jobs_for_young_journalists_ at_cbc.html. The Affordable Care Act has not solved this problem completely, but it does at least prove that change in the direction of universal affordable health care, even in a country in which large numbers of people are ideologically opposed to single-payer state health insurance, is possible. Hardwig, Is There a Duty to Die?, 123. Scheffler, Death and the Afterlife, 44. Logan’s Run is a 1976 dystopian science fiction movie (directed by Michael Anderson) in which people are obliged to turn themselves over to the state for euthanasia at the age of thirty. People are killed en masse in public spectacles. As the title implies, the protagonist Logan resists the atrocity by demanding the right to live beyond the state-appointed limit. See Overall, Aging, Death, and Human Longevity, 23–63.

Notes to pages 199–220

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Momeyer, Confronting Death, 41. Parfit, Reasons and Persons, 388. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 149. Brombert, Musings on Mortality, 15. Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, 157. Ibid., 159. Nussbaum, Therapy of Desire, 226. Aristotle, “Nicomachean Ethics,” 1103 (1176b25–35). Scheffler, Death and the Afterlife, 56–7. See Williams, “The Makropulos Case,” 82–100. Čapek, The Makropulos Secret, 110–77. Amongst the most important of the criticisms are Steele, “Could Body-Bound Immortality Be Liveable?”; Fischer, “Why Immortality Is Not So Bad”; Wisniewski, “Is Immortal Life Worth Living?”; Chappell, “Infinity Goes Up on Trial”; Bortolotti and Nagasawa, “Immortality without Boredom.” Overall also criticizes Williams in Aging, Death, and Human Longevity, 159. For my own discussion of the case see Noonan, “The Life-Value of Death,” 15–17. Altshuler, “Immortality, Identity, and Desirability,” 193. Buben, “Resources for Overcoming the Boredom,” 213. Santayana, “A Long Way Round to Nirvana,” 59. Aronson, Living without God, 173.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

c on c lusi on Kaufmann, Tragedy and Philosophy, 81–2. Ibid., 297. Pascal, Selections from the Thoughts, 64. Goldman, The Hidden God, 67. Ibid., 69. Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life, 34. Ibid., 47. Ibid., 45. Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 267–8. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 235–6. Gawande, Being Mortal, 28. Stevens, “Sunday Morning,” 68–9. Ibid., 69.

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Index

acceleration society, 76–96; and alienation, 77–9, 88; and communication technology, 92–4; and harm to creativity, 88–96; and harm to health, 79–82; and harm to relationships, 82–8 Adam, 14–18, 21, 39 Adam, Barbara, 78, 107 Affordable Care Act, 196 Agacinski, Sylviane, 63 Agar, Nicolas, 61–2, 65, 227n6 alienated labour, 77, 98, 100, 103–4; and multitasking, 89–91 Altshuler, Roman, 209 Andrews, Laurie, 61 Annas, George, 61 Antonovsky, Aaron, 129, 131 Arendt, Hannah, 73 Aristotle, 100, 111, 207, 231n1 Aronowitz, Stanley, 98 Aronson, Ron, 212 art, 111, 115, 123, 135, 238n29; as non-alienated labour, 164–70 artificial intelligence, 71–2 Aurelius, Marcus, 153–4 autonomy, 60–6, 106 Badiou, Alain, 150 Baroud, Ramzy, 33 Baruchello, Giorgio, 23 Basu, Sanjay, 236n25 beauty, 164, 167–70, 206–7, 220 Beauvoir, Simone, de 74 Beckett, Samuel, 164 Benatar, David, 24–30, 34, 92, 182; and asymmetry argument, 26–8;

contradictions of, 26–8; and death, 25–7; and philosophical pessimism, 24–30; and philosophy, 24–5; and self-deception, 25, 29; and value of not existing, 25–6; and wrongness of being born, 24–7 Bennholdt-Thomsen, Veronika, 63 Bentham, Jeremy, 66, 172 biology, as disvalue, 44–55, 61, 65 bio-Luddism, 61 birth, existential significance of, 23, 30, 56, 73–4, 169 Borges, Jorge Luis, 168 Bostrom, Nick, 41–2, 54, 57, 67, 75, 150 Bradley, Ben, 26–7 Brombert, Victor, 203 Brown, John, 169 Buben, Adam, 209–10 Buddhism, 21 Camus, Albert, 10, 94–5, 135–6, 149, 168, 227n43 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 193–4 Čapek, Karel, 209 capitalism, 51, 60, 64, 73, 93, 96–7, 112, 117, 153, 234n49; ruling value system of, x, 64, 132, 153, 140; time under, 99–101, 107 care, 69, 72, 109–10, 128–30, 135–7, 159, 187–9, 203 Casey, Edward S., 88 Césaire, Aimé, 60–1 character, 83–4, 202 Christianity, 120, 215–16

258

Index

colonialism, 60–1, 119 communication technology, 76, 92–4, 108 conservatism, 55–6 constraints (on capacity expression), x, 11, 40, 42, 50, 64, 115, 117, 205; biological, 49–52; extrinsic, xi, 5, 6, 11–12, 30–9, 44, 58, 112, 115, 162, 167, 195; intrinsic, xi– xii, 5, 11–12, 30–9, 49, 51, 58, 112, 118, 140, 145, 162, 167, 195; and life-coherence, 171; and nonalienated labour, 166; and science, 40; and technotopianism, 40, 50, 53–4, 67, 15; temporal, 77 consumerism, 66–7 contractualism, 65 core human capacities, 5, 42, 49, 57, 104, 126, 128, 133, 137, 175, 225n2; and embodiment, 82; and human good, 35, 44, 49, 51, 69, 94, 130 Crary, Jonathan, 79–80 Cutler, Jonathan, 98 Dante, 111 Davies, Karen, 109–10 death, xii, xiii, 3–5, 7–8, 10, 11, 14– 18, 159, 168, 169, 201, 212; abolition of, 52–5; deprivation account of, 182, 186, 189, 190, 201; fear of, 16, 21–2, 25, 138, 180, 181–7, 191, 201–2; life-value of, 180, 183– 4, 238–9n1; as limit to life-value, 14–18, 180, 182–4, 190, 205, 214, 220; as motivation for non-alienated labour, 180, 185, 187, 190, 195, 201–13; as ultimate frame of finitude, 7, 115, 126–7, 143, 155, 178–9, 180–1, 187, 205, 213, 222; value for others, 192–3 DeGrazia, David, 29 de Grey, Aubrey, 52–3, 141 dependence, 138–9, 171, 176, 201 Descartes, René, 42–3, 123, 126 dignity, 55–60; and challenge, 57–8;

conservative definition of, 60; lifevalue of, 57–9; and technotopianism, 57 disease, 46–9, 128–39 Doyal, Len, 29 Dupuy, J.P., 45 Durkheim, Emile, 37, 186 Dussel, Enrique, 120 duty, to die, 195–201 Dvorsky, George, 76 Dyer-Witheford, Nick, 104 Edgeworth, Frances, 66, 176 egalitarianism, 61, 63–5 egocentrism (egoism), x, 18, 23, 41– 4, 46, 49, 66–70, 111, 115, 133–5, 177, 182, 185, 191, 198, 204, 217, 221–2 embodiment, 14, 18, 41, 50–2, 73, 82, 89, 112, 136, 163, 168; as frame of finitude, 115; and human limitations, 28, 134, 165 enduring time, 106–7 enhancement, 42, 46–7, 50; and capitalism, 60–6; and dignity, 55–60; and happiness, 52, 66–70 Epic of Gilgamesh, 42 Epicurus, 183 equality, moral, 65 ethical wholeness (of life), 179, 195, 201–13, 215, 221 eugenics, 42, 61–2 Eve, 16, 18 evil, 19–21; metaphysical, 38 evolution, 20, 25, 35–6, 38, 40, 44, 47, 49–50, 56, 68, 78, 118, 157, 163, 165, 190 externalist fallacy, 70, 72–3 extropy, 50 Eyer, Joseph, 81 failure (and non-alienated labour), 161–70; existential, 167–8 Fairfield, Paul, 183 faith, 219–20 fallacy of division, 35

Index

feminism, 48, 106, 109, 158; and critique of eugenics, 62–3; and women’s autonomy, 63 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 148 Fineman, Martha Albertson, 138 food, politics of, 118–20 Fra Angelico, 111 frames of finitude, 4, 15, 28, 38, 41, 54, 112, 180, 205; chosen, 145–50; disease as, 128–39; material, 115; as motivation for non-alienated labour, 7, 117, 120, 125, 153, 181, 210–11, 223; natural, 114–45; overcome by technology, 53–4 freedom, 41, 116, 223; defined, 76; existential, 73–4, 121, 149, 212; and natural necessity, 120–1; and non-alienated labour, 120; and play, 94; social and political, 74, 118, 120, 121 French Revolution, 56 Freud, Sigmund, 139, 156–7, 185, 191–2 friendship, 104, 145, 147–50 Fukuyama, Francis, 56–7 functionalism, 45, 228n15 Gandhi, 42 Gawande, Atul, 176, 220 genetic engineering, 41, 46, 48, 55, 60, 62, 71, 74 genius, 166–7 Geras, Norman, 238n46 Gindin, Sam, 98 Glover, Jonathan, 42, 48, 231n74 Goethe, Wolfgang, 130, 166 Goldmann, Lucien, 215 good life, 4, 9–11, 18, 94–5, 103–4, 111–12, 127, 178, 190–1; and frames of finitude, 4, 8, 12–13, 28, 67, 113, 115, 129, 136, 141, 143, 154, 222–3; materialist conception of, ix–x, xii, 206; not reducible to pleasure and pain, 31–4, 143–4; social dimension of, 210–11; subjective and objective, 35; technotopian

259

conception of, 41–2, 50, 54, 66; temporality of, 14, 15, 28, 34, 172, 185, 188, 191–3, 195, 211, 220–1; and tragedy, 214–15, 218 Gorz, André, 98 Gros, Frédéric, 106 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, 87–8 Habermas, Jurgen, 62 happiness, 19–21, 66–8, 98, 136, 153, 160, 163–4, 172, 174, 177, 200, 215, 222 Hardwig, John, 196 Harvey, David, 104 Hassan, Robert, 93–4 health, 43, 65, 130–1; social, 129, 132–4, 199; social determinants of, 132–4, 198 healthcare, 64–5, 131 hedonism, ix, 10, 43, 171–2, 175–6, 191, 206, 221 hedonistic imperative, 46–7 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 226n42 Heidegger, Martin, 130, 182, 190 Heraclitus, 30 Hitler, Adolf, 42 Hochschild, Arlie Russell, 85–6 homeostasis, 80 Hughes, James, 47, 64 human historical project, defined, 211 human nature, 29, 42, 51, 54–7, 70, 176 Hurley, Michael, 98 idealism, x imagination, 163–4; artistic, 165–7 immortality, 22–3, 42, 76, 198; and meaninglessness, 191–2, 204–6, 208–13 income, as social determinant of health, 132 India, 119 individuality, 22–3, 57, 88, 116, 137, 148, 213

260

individuation, 201–13, 221 information processing, 44–5, 53–4, 69, 70, 124, 129, 163, 181 Innocent III, 10 intentionality, 163 interdependence, xii, 4, 30, 120–1, 124, 128, 136, 138, 146–54, 171, 176, 178, 187, 221 Issi, Rosario, 61 Jackson, Joseph, 48, 67 Janáček, Leos, 209 Job, 12–14, 18, 177 Jonas, Hans, 72–3, 121–2 Kant, Immanuel, 6, 166 Kasser, Tim, 105–6 Kaufmann, Walter, 214–15 Kierkegaard, Søren, 202, 209 Kurzweil, Ray, 44–5, 50–1, 59, 67–8, 71–3, 122–4, 163, 219 Kushi, K.M., 119–21 Larkin, Philip, 182–4, 202 law of accelerating returns, 50, 51 Lefebvre, Henri, 69 leisure, 97–9, 101 Lenin, Vladimir, 96 Leopardi, Giacomo, 3, 18 Levitin, Dan, 90–1 life-capital, 7, 85, 89, 171–9, 187, 189–90, 192–3, 203, 206 life-coherence principle, 74–5, 122, 134, 170, 180–1, 193, 194, 197, 199–200, 206, 221 life-necessity: and freedom, 121–2; and meaning, 116–17 life-project (as non-alienated labour), 160–70, 172–5; extrinsic limits on, 161–2; intrinsic limits on, 161–2 life-requirements, ix–xi, 66, 96, 99, 102, 118, 129, 136, 141, 149, 160, 162, 193, 200, 204, 205. See also needs lifespan, 197–200

Index

lifetime, 7, 49, 83, 90, 96, 102, 103, 115, 142, 173, 209, 219 life-value, 9–10, 20, 43, 47–8, 64, 78–9, 81, 82, 84, 88, 94–6, 113, 115, 118, 133, 139–45, 147–8, 153, 155–8, 160–1, 165, 167, 178, 192–3, 195, 197–8, 201, 202, 204, 210, 214; and close attention, 90– 2, 105–6, 111–12, 121; and death, 180–9; egocentric, 41–4; and failure, 160–71; and future, 171–9; intrinsic, 60, 70, 117, 207; and loss, 154–6, 168, 172–3, 179, 184–5, 187, 193, 205, 222; and mortality, 204–5, 210–12, 214; and nonalienated labour, 170–2; not fun and games, 207–8, 213; philosophy, 9–10, 45–6, 51, 59; potential, 189; and science, 122–5; subjective and objective, 36–8; and tragedy, 214– 23; and truth, 126–8 Logan’s Run, 198 longevity escape velocity, 53 loss, and non-alienated labour, 153– 60 love, 37, 135, 147–50, 188; and loss, 154–6, 168, 172–3; and objective value, 159, 184–5, 187, 193, 205, 222 Lucretius, 192, 210 Lyotard, Jean-François, 111 machines, 71–3 machine time, 78–80, 86, 94, 100, 107 MacIntyre, Linden, 193–5 MacLeod, Alastair, 159 Madoff, Bernie, 177 Mann, Thomas, 114, 116 Marcuse, Herbert, 9, 170, 191–2, 219 market forces, 48–9, 68, 76–7, 84, 99 Marmot, Sir Richard, 132 Martineau, Jonathan, 101 Marx, Karl, 40, 77, 79, 87–8, 97, 169;

Index

on alienated labour, 116–17, 192; on freedom, 121–2; on love, 148 Masada, 186 materialism, 215–17; historical, ix, xii, xiii, 181; Marxist, 55; reductionist, 181 materialist ethics, ix, 130, 146, 181, 216, 217, 219, 235n2 May, Todd, 174–5 McKibben, Bill, 69 McMurtry, John, ix, 6, 9, 32, 36, 70, 74, 175, 189 meaning, 6, 72, 190; and care, 173– 4; and future, 171–5; and knowledge, 124–6; of life, 10, 92, 102–3, 108, 112, 116, 169; and life-capital, 175–9; and non-alienated labour, 6–7, 95–6, 100, 111–19, 121, 127, 175, 221 medicine, 128–9, 133; allopathic, 130–3 memory, 143, 156 Mies, Maria, 63 Milton, John, 14–18, 21 Mitchell, David, 60–1 Modell, Arnold H., 163 modernity, 77 Moller, Dan, 157–8 Momeyer, Richard, 199 money-value, x, 51, 60, 65, 66, 81, 84, 101–2, 107, 111, 112, 122, 132–3, 136–8, 148, 161, 172, 175, 177. See also capitalism Moravec, Hans, 49, 61, 67, 73 More, Max, 50–1 Motherwell, Robert, 164–5 Munch, Edvard, 135 Muniz, Vik, 234n55 Nagel, Thomas, 12, 181, 192 Narcissus, 36 nature, as field of life-support, 44, 54, 69, 118, 127, 187, 206 needs, 66, 78, 88, 96, 106, 109–10, 116, 118, 123, 127, 136, 146–9,

261

152, 163, 177, 189, 194, 210, 219. See also life-requirements network time, 93–4 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 130 nihilism, 190 nirvana, 22 Noddings, Nel, 137 non-alienated labour, 6, 30, 85, 106, 115–18, 164, 190, 207; and creation of meaning, 117, 181, 192, 205–6, 212; defined, 116–17, 146, 166; and future, 117, 171–9, 185– 6, 191, 194, 212; on the self, 114– 44, 146–53, 192, 205 Nussbaum, Martha, 192, 205, 210 Obama, Barack, 51 Oedipus, 13–14 old age, 139–44; as intrinsic constraint, 141; life-value of, 139–42; and non-alienated labour, 141–4 Osborne, Peter, 96 Oskvig, Kyle, 47 Overall, Christine, 140, 198 pain (as life-value), 30–4, 38, 158, 171 Parfit, Derek, 200 Pascal, Blaise, 215–17 pathogenic approach (to medicine), 129, 131 Pearce, David, 46, 165 Peck, Robert, 168, 169 Pender, Stephen, 129 Perkins, Wendy, 105 pessimism, 4–5, 6, 11–39, 115, 127, 128, 139, 153, 180, 182, 221; contradictions of, 35, 37–8, 40; philosophical, 19–30, 153; poetic, 11, 12–18, 153 philosophy, 4, 10, 24–5, 154, 191–2, 198, 201, 203. See also life-value philosophy Plato, x, 67–8, 139, 177 play, 7, 14, 93–4, 103, 104, 116, 132, 207

262

pleasure (and life-value), 32–3, 176–7 pleonexia, 67 Pliny the Elder, 10 poetry, 11, 168–9 post-humanism, 66 preferences (and morality), 67 primary axiom of value, x process time, 109–113 Proteus, 150 rationality: instrumental, 173; material, 12, 32, 34, 74, 133, 155, 157, 171, 173, 176, 181, 183, 185, 193, 201, 205, 207 relationships: human-machine, 151– 2; as non-alienated labour, 151–3, 157–9 religion, 218 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 184–5 risk, as life-value, 150, 152, 166–8 Rosa, Hartmut, 76, 77, 79, 84 Rosenberg, Jay, 239n8 Roure, F., 45 sacrifice, 188–9 Salleh, Ariel, 106, 111 salutogenic approach (to medicine), 131, 134, 138 Sandel, Michael, 55–6, 92 Santayana, George, 211 Sarton, Mary, 138 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 149 Savulescu, Julian, 47, 63 Scarry, Elaine, 168 Scheffler, Samuel, 134, 171–4, 177, 182, 188, 198, 207 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 19–24, 25, 29; on death, 21–2; on evil, 19–21; on metaphysical illusions, 20; and pessimism, 19–24 Schor, Juliet, 97–8 science, 5, 39, 41–5, 46, 50, 55, 111, 112, 181, 198, 199; different from philosophy, 124–5; and good life, 40, 43, 46; as non-alienated labour, 122–8

Index

Segal, Lynne, 139, 142, 158 self-deception, 20, 25, 29, 35–6 Seneca, 130, 154 Sennett, Richard, 83–5 sexuality, 88 Shippen, Nichole Marie, 98, 100 Shiva, Vandana, 119, 120 Silver, Lee, 48 Singer, Irving, 127, 137, 141, 147–8, 151 Smilansky, Saul, 29–30, 32 social field, 36 socialism, 117 Socrates, 139 Sophocles, 13 Spinoza, Baruch, 156, 159 Srnicek, Nick, 40–1, 98, 100 Star Trek: The Next Generation, 122 Steinhoff, James, 227n2 Sterling, Peter, 81–2 Stevens, Wallace, 129, 143, 220 Stoicism, 153–5 Storr, Anthony, 163 St Paul, 68, 191 stress, 80–2, 131 struggle: and creativity, 160–9; for free time, 96–9, 104; goodness of, 4, 12, 27, 28, 32, 34, 38, 42, 50–1, 53, 58–9, 77, 95, 114, 118, 121, 124–5, 140, 153, 177, 203, 207–10 Stuckler, David, 236n25 suffering: as disvalue, xiii, 9–39, 43, 207, 218; as life-value, 130, 135, 169, 215 suicide, 9, 21, 26, 28–9, 37–8, 186, 227n43 superintelligence, 57, 61, 67, 75, 123–4, 150–1, 165, 208 technology, 45–6, 126; and capitalism, 51; and core human capabilities, 50–1 technotopianism, 5, 40–75, 76, 108, 112, 115, 139, 180, 182, 195; contradictions of, 51, 54, 70–5, 122, 150, 165, 191, 198, 204–5, 207–8,

Index

210; defined, 41; and faith, 219– 20; and pessimism, 41; and science, 123–5, 128–9 time, 6, 114; colonization of, 100–1; as extrinsic constraint, 76–95, 96– 7, 108–10; as matrix of freedom, 76, 81–3, 86, 96–113; politics of, 86, 96–113; under capitalism, 99– 101, 107. See also enduring time; machine time; network time; process time Timpanaro, Sebastiano, 229n39 Tolstoy, Leo, 202–3 tragedy, 7, 179, 211, 214–23 transhumanism, 5, 7, 40–75, 227n8; contradictions of, 6, 51, 54, 67, 151; different from liberal eugenics, 42 Turkle, Sherry, 151–2

263

United States, 64 utilitarianism, 66, 200 Victor, Peter A., 98 Vietnam, 186 Virilio, Paul, 88, 165 virtual reality, 45, 52, 53–5, 94, 208 Wajcman, Judith, 79–80, 90 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 96 Warsaw ghetto, 186 Watson, Josephine, 232n13 Weinberg, Steven, 126, 235n12 Williams, Alex, 90–1, 98 Williams, Bernard, 208–10 Wolf, Susan, 174–5 wonder, 123, 168 work-life balance, 85–6 Zealots, 186

Unamuno, Miguel de, 217–18