Religion and the Meaning of Life: An Existential Approach 1108432980, 9781108432986

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title page
Series page
Title page
Copyright page
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 - Why Should We Care about Meaning?
2 - Boredom
3 - Denial of Death
4 - Acquiring Meaning
5 - Suicide
6 - The Divine One
7 - Life after Death
8 - Obstacles
9 - How Should We Live So as to Die Well?
Epilogue - Facts the Heart Can Feel
Notes
References
Index

Citation preview

Religion and the Meaning of Life

An Existential Approach

As humans, we want to live meaningfully, yet we are often driven by impulse. In Religion and the Meaning of Life, Williams investigates this paradox – one with profound implications. Delving into felt realities pertinent to meaning, such as boredom, trauma, suicide, denial of death, and indifference, Williams describes ways to acquire meaning and potential obstacles to its acquisition. This book is unique in its willingness to transcend a more secular stance and explore how one’s belief in God may be relevant to life’s meaning. Religion and the Meaning of Life’s interdisciplinary approach makes it useful to philosophers, religious studies scholars, psychologists, students, and general readers alike. The insights from this book have profound real-world applications – they can transform how readers search for meaning and, consequently, how readers see and exist in the world. Clifford Williams is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Trinity International University. He is the author of Free Will and Determinism: A Dialogue and Existential Reasons for Belief in God: A Defense of Desires and Emotions for Faith.

CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN RELIGION, PHILOSOPHY, AND SOCIETY SERIES EDITORS PAUL K. MOSER, Loyola University, Chicago CHAD MEISTER, Bethel College, Indiana This is a series of interdisciplinary texts devoted to major-level courses in religion, philosophy, and related fields. It includes original, current, and wide-spanning contributions by leading scholars from various disciplines that (a) focus on the central academic topics in religion and philosophy, (b) are seminal and up-to-date regarding recent developments in scholarship on the various key topics, and (c) incorporate, with needed precision and depth, the major differing perspectives and backgrounds – the central voices on the major religions and the religious, philosophical, and sociological viewpoints that cover the intellectual landscape today. Cambridge Studies in Religion, Philosophy, and Society is a direct response to this recent and widespread interest and need. RECENT BOOKS IN THE SERIES Roger Trigg Religious Diversity: Philosophical and Political Dimensions John Cottingham Philosophy of Religion: Towards a More Humane Approach William J. Wainwright Reason, Revelation, and Devotion: Inference and Argument in Religion Harry J. Gensler Ethics and Religion Fraser Watts Psychology, Religion, and Spirituality: Concepts and Applications Gordon Graham Philosophy, Art, and Religion: Understanding Faith and Creativity Keith Ward The Christian Idea of God: A Philosophical Foundation for Faith Timothy Samuel Shah and Jack Friedman Homo Religiosus? Exploring the Roots of Religion and Religious Freedom in Human Experience Sylvia Walsh Kierkegaard and Religion: Personality, Character, and Virtue Roger S. Gottlieb Morality and the Environmental Crisis J. L. Schellenberg Religion after Science: The Cultural Consequences of Religious Immaturity Clifford Williams Religion and the Meaning of Life: An Existential Approach

Religion and the Meaning of Life An Existential Approach

CLIFFORD WILLIAMS

University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108421560 doi: 10.1017/9781108377317 © Clifford Williams 2020 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2020 Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd. Padstow Cornwall A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data names: Williams, Clifford, 1943– author. title: Religion and the meaning of life : an existential approach / Clifford Williams, Trinity International University, Illinois. description: Cambridge, United Kingdom : Cambridge University Press, 2020. | Series: Cambridge studies in religion, philosophy, and society | Includes bibliographical references and index. identifiers: lccn 2019041193 (print) | lccn 2019041194 (ebook) | isbn 9781108421560 (hardback) | isbn 9781108377317 (ebook) subjects: lcsh: Philosophy and religion. | Meaning (Philosophy) | Life. | Religion. | Spirituality. classification: lcc bl51 .w5877 2020 (print) | lcc bl51 (ebook) | ddc 204–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019041193 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019041194 isbn 978-1-108-42156-0 Hardback isbn 978-1-108-43298-6 Paperback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

Acknowledgments

page vi

Introduction

1

1 Why Should We Care about Meaning? 2 Boredom

8 30

3 Denial of Death

42

4 Acquiring Meaning 5 Suicide

56 79

6 The Divine One 7 Life after Death

97 112

8 Obstacles

135

9 How Should We Live So as to Die Well? Epilogue: Facts the Heart Can Feel

153 174

Notes

176

References Index

179 186

v

Acknowledgments

I want to thank Chad Meister and Paul Moser, editors of the series of which this book is a part, for asking me to do this book; the two anonymous reviewers for Cambridge University Press for their valuable insights; students in my Death and the Meaning of Life classes at Wheaton College for their discussions of issues treated in this book; Ryan Kemp, Bob O’Connor, Adam Wood, and Jay Wood for discussing the first chapter at a Wheaton College philosophy department colloquium; Kent Anderson, Michael Au-Mullaney, Joshua LeClere, Laurie Lee, Tim McGarvey, Mark Talbot, Christie Taylor, Henry Williams, and Brady Woods for commenting on one or more of the chapters; Sadie McCloud and Phil Christie for talking about ideas connected to meaning; Christine Dunn and Linda Williams for their copyediting; and Sarah Denne and Jeni Eklund for going through the whole book and discussing it with me chapter by chapter at Live Café in Oak Park, Illinois. I owe Sarah and Jeni big thanks for their numerous insights that made their way into the entire book. I also thank Wipf & Stock Publishers for their permission to use a condensed and reworked version of pages 59–70 in my The Divided Soul: Kierkegaardian Explorations for four pages in “The Lure of the Crowd” in Chapter 8.

vi

Introduction

We humans are troubling paradoxes. We intensely want our lives to be meaningful, to count for something, to matter not only in individual and social ways but in a “cosmic” way. At the same time, we often evade thinking about meaning and let ourselves be driven by impulse instead of meaningfulness. This paradox is troubling – and puzzling – because it looks as though we undermine the very thing we most want. This book is about both poles of this paradox. It describes ways of acquiring meaning plus obstacles to acquiring meaning, including ones we ourselves initiate. It also connects each of these poles to belief in a divine creator. Sometimes this connection will be prominent, and sometimes it will be in the background. Either way, a main aim of the book is to show how meaning is connected to that belief.

some assumptions “Religion” is a large category, so I am going to narrow it to theism, the belief that there is an all-benevolent, all-powerful, all-knowing creator of the universe, including humans. To be welcoming to the three major theistic religions – Christianity, Islam, and Judaism – I am going to use the phrase “the Divine One” instead of “God,” “Allah,” or “Yahweh.” In doing so, I do not assume or imply that Christians, Muslims, and Jews worship the same divine being. There are significant differences in their conceptions of the Divine One. At the same time, all three faiths are theistic in the preceding sense. As such, they all regard the Divine One as a person who loves humans and who desires for humans to live meaningfully. I will henceforth refer to the Divine One as a person. I am going 1

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to assume that such a person exists because all my allotted space must be devoted to dealing with meaning and its connection to belief in a divine person. Nontheists who write on meaning typically do the same – they assume that there is no divine person, or no good evidence for one, because they want to discuss meaning given that assumption. One cannot justify every assumption one makes – else every book would be extremely long. Moreover, theists and nontheists can learn from each other. Although there are significant differences between theists and nontheists with respect to meaning, there are areas of common concern, such as the extent to which emotions play a role in meaning, what activities are intrinsically good, or whether Arthur Schopenhauer’s critique of goal-aiming activities is right. The reader will notice that I refer positively to a number of nontheists throughout the book. This is because these writers have good insights about the meaning of life. My own tradition is Christianity. Everything I say, however, and every quotation from a Christian author, can, I hope, be accepted by those whose traditions are Islamic or Jewish. Along with theism, I am going to assume that, for some at least, there is a life beyond death in which there is a closer relationship to the Divine One and that is free from the ills of predeath life. In addition, I am going to assume that morality is objective. To say that morality is objective is to say that there are objectively true moral statements, such as “love is better than hate,” “it is wrong to discriminate unfairly against minorities,” and “the virtues of compassion and generosity are better than indifference in appropriate situations.” I am also going to assume that these three statements can be known to be true, along with a number of other such statements. There are, to be sure, moral statements that are controversial, thus casting doubt on whether humans can know those statements. And some of the contexts in which one attempts to live out the statements are complex, casting doubt on how to apply the statements. Still, it seems equally true that some moral statements are noncontroversially known and that there are numerous contexts in which it is evident how to live out those statements. These are the moral statements that I am assuming to be able to be known and able to be applied in some contexts. Even if the quantity of such statements is not high, there are enough to make objective judgments about meaning. Last, I am going to assume that objective morality is required to have meaning. If objective morality were not required to have meaning, it would not make sense to say that what one person has done is

Introduction

3

more meaningful than what another person has done, or to say that a given person was once deluded about their life’s meaning but now is not. These last assertions seem clearly true, and they are commonly believed. Moreover, if objective morality were not required for meaning, there could be no duty to care about meaning, and there could be no intrinsic goods that make life meaningful. I will be assuming that there is such a duty and that there are intrinsic goods that make life meaningful. I am not going to assume, however, that beliefs in a divine person and life after death are necessary for belief in the meaningfulness of one’s life. This further claim must be argued for. But I am not going to argue for it, as one of the major theses of the book is that belief in these two assumptions, plus their truth, enhances the meaningfulness of one’s life. This thesis means that one’s life can be meaningful without believing these two assumptions and without there being a divine person or an afterlife, but that one would have a more meaningful life if one did believe in a divine person and in life after death and if these did exist. This last assertion is what I will call the “enhancement thesis.” I am also not going to assume that happiness is the sole intrinsic good, that is, that hedonism is true. I will refer often to intrinsic goods, plural, implying thereby that happiness is not the sole intrinsic good. Those who believe that hedonism is true can easily rework what I say in those contexts into a hedonistic framework. Readers who do not believe in a divine person, life after death, or objective morality can read this book as describing what would be the case if there were a divine person, life after death, and objective morality. They can also attend to the numerous thoughts that do not depend on these for their truth.

an existential approach Socrates is known both for his passion and his clarity of thought. He was passionate about searching for truth, engaging people in conversations and exhorting them to care for their souls, as he put it in The Apology in his defense before the Athenian jury that later sentenced him to death: “I go around doing nothing but persuading people both young and old among you not to care for your body or your wealth in preference to or as strongly as for the best possible state of your soul” (Plato 2000: 32–3 [30a4–b1]). Socrates also paid careful attention to the logic of arguments, stating them with a high level of explicitness and precision, as he is

4

Religion and the Meaning of Life

depicted doing in Plato’s early dialogues. He made distinctions and was scrupulous about accuracy. Socrates is not normally thought of as an existentialist. Yet these two features – passion and clarity – can be regarded as qualities of a good existentialist writer, especially one who deals with the meaning of life. Being passionate does not mean that one tries to engender emotions in the reader by using emotionally charged language. It does mean that one’s direct and candid language is about emotions that matter. Clarity of thought does not mean that one is simplistic or that one is not profound. It does mean that one’s writing is accessible both to professionals and to those who are relatively unacquainted with the subject matter. Religion and the Meaning of Life: An Existential Approach aims for passion and clarity in these ways. With respect to content, the existential approach of this book means that instead of engaging primarily in conceptual analysis of the concept of meaning and kindred concepts, it deals with boredom, death, and suicide, along with evasions and obstacles, plus how one can live so as to die well. It means, too, that the book contains large swaths of descriptions in addition to argumentation – descriptions of lived realities connected with pursuing meaning, both those that nourish the pursuit and those that obstruct it. The conviction behind an existential approach to meaning is that the human search for meaning typically springs out of these lived realities. Boredom prompts one to ask, “Why should I keep living if nothing interests me?” The reality of death induces one to ask, “Is there any point to my life if all that I am, my feelings, hopes, and body, will one day vanish?” Of boredom and death we can say, to use Albert Camus’s words, “These are facts the heart can feel” (Camus 1983: 3). An existential approach focuses on such facts. But it does not end there, for, as Camus continues, such facts “call for careful study before they become clear to the intellect” (3). And, one might add, becoming clear to the intellect is important because pinpointing precisely the inner states that prevent one from acquiring meaning is often necessary to acquire meaning. Both feeling and precision are important in discussions of meaning. In adopting an existential approach to meaning, I am following Susan J. Brison’s practice in her Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of the Self (Brison 2003). Brison recounts her traumatic experience of being raped and left for dead while on a morning walk when visiting southern France. She links this experience and the

Introduction

5

frightful experiences of others with the philosophical issue of what constitutes personal identity. Violent trauma, she says, breaks up identity in ways that are not easily accounted for by current philosophical conceptions of personal identity. Philosophers who discuss personal identity, therefore, need to deal with a wider array of experiences than they currently do. The existential approach in this book is similar to Brison’s approach in hers – conceptions of the meaning of life need to be able to deal with boredom, death, and suicidal impulses, along with other impassioned experiences. A prominent part of much existentialist writing is a problem-solution, or diagnosis-remedy, motif. Some philosophical classics also contain this motif, including Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. It is not that the first half of such writing describes the problem and the second half the solution, but that both problem and solution, diagnosis and remedy, are woven throughout. This book is the same. Even though these terms do not appear in the book, readers can organize the ideas in every chapter into diagnosis and remedy categories.

meaning and the good life When most people think of a meaningful life, they think of one that is worthwhile. That is, they regard their lives as meaningful when they do worthwhile things. Accordingly, finding meaning for them involves finding something worthwhile in which to engage. Susan Wolf expresses this thought in her claim that “meaningfulness in life arises from engagement in worthwhile activity” (Wolf 1997: 213). What people need, she says, when they need meaning is something that is worthwhile, and when people say that an activity is meaningful they are basing their assertion on an activity’s being worthwhile (213–14). Julian Baggini also connects being worthwhile with meaning. The question about the meaning of life, he says, is “about why life is of value to us, why we think it to be important and worth living” (Baggini 2004: 166). This connection, he says, is what makes the question of meaning “perfectly coherent” (166). I am going to adopt this connection of meaning and being worthwhile, with the proviso that it is at least logically possible that there be cases of meaningful lives that are not worthwhile and cases of worthwhile lives that are not meaningful. Thaddeus Metz maintains that there are such cases (Metz 2012: 443–4). These, however, will not play a role in this book, for, as Metz states, typically what is meaningful coincides with what is worthwhile. This book concerns itself with what is typical in this

6

Religion and the Meaning of Life

regard. The pursuit of meaning is commonly believed to be based on the pursuit of a good life. I shall adopt this common belief as well. People commonly believe, also, that a good life includes both worthwhile activities and good inner states, including emotions, desires, and feelings. It would hardly be a good life in which one acted well but on balance had “negative” or harmful emotions or wrong desires. What counts as being meaningful, then, includes both worthwhile activities and good inner states. This is stated by Wolf in a later, expanded statement of what constitutes meaning: “Meaning arises when subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness” (Wolf 2010: 9). In different words, meaning arises when worthwhile activities and good inner states are conjoined. Both are necessary for a good life and therefore for a meaningful life. This conjunction will play a prominent role in the book.

chapter summaries Chapter 1, “Why Should We Care about Meaning?,” gives two answers to the question in the title of the chapter: we humans desire to acquire meaning, so there is an expectation that we will care about it, and a divine creator desires that humans satisfy the desires for intrinsic goods and right pleasures that the divine creator has placed in humans. The chapter suggests that caring about meaning can be regarded as a virtue alongside commonly accepted virtues, and describes the characteristics it would have as a virtue. Chapter 2, “Boredom,” distinguishes everyday boredom from existential boredom and describes the terror that is often felt when existential boredom threatens. It also describes evasive tactics that are used to avoid that terror. Without these evasive tactics, one could experience dread, agony, despair, frustration, rebellion, or suicidal feelings. One can, however, deal with boredom in a different way by regarding it as a “call from eternity.” In doing so, boredom would become an occasion for acquiring meaning for one’s life. Chapter 3, “Denial of Death,” uses Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death to describe immortality projects and vital lies that are often used to avoid the terror of death. It also explicates Becker’s thought that the prospect of death can prompt a radical change: a “dying” and a “rebirth,” which, again, would serve as an occasion for acquiring meaning. Chapter 4, “Acquiring Meaning,” describes four ways philosophers have thought that one could acquire meaning – by achieving goals, being creative, having certain virtues and emotions, and giving and receiving

Introduction

7

love. Achieving goals is defended against Arthur Schopenhauer’s critique of goal-aimed activity, and the concept of non-goal-aimed activities is introduced. The thesis of the chapter, that all four ways of acquiring meaning are legitimate and desirable, is relatively uncontroversial, though rarely stated. Chapter 5, “Suicide,” asks whether any of the four ways of acquiring meaning described in Chapter 4 can prevent people from killing themselves. The varied answers to this question are based on several intensive autobiographical accounts of people who attempted suicide. Chapter 6, “The Divine One,” and Chapter 7, “Life after Death,” unpack a main thesis of the book, that believing in the Divine One and believing in life beyond death enhance the meaning of life. In both cases, there are additional virtues and emotions one can have, the urge to transcend oneself can be satisfied, and existential boredom can be cured. With belief in life after death, the existential harm of death with extinction can be avoided, and hope can be added to one’s other virtues and emotions. Both chapters end with an “existential move”: those who do not believe in the Divine One or in life beyond death should be distressed by the thought that there is no divine creator or life after death. Chapter 8, “Obstacles,” describes four significant obstacles to acquiring meaning: unconscious motives, the lure of the crowd, dividedness, and constricted circumstances that produce suffering. The conclusion of the chapter is that sometimes these obstacles are overcome and sometimes they are not. In Chapter 9, “How Should We Live so as to Die Well?,” I use Ivan Ilyich’s life, as told by Leo Tolstoy in his story, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, to answer the question of the chapter. One answer is to be aware and open. Another is to develop character traits opposite to those of Ivan Ilyich, which were inordinate delight in the power to crush his inferiors, disproportionate pleasure in trivialities, and excessive self-regard. The chapter ends with a conversation between an imagined, transformed Ivan as he lay dying and a friend of his. Overall, the aim of Religion and the Meaning of Life: An Existential Approach is to make explicit the troubling paradox between wanting a meaningful life yet evading it in various ways. Its aim is also to connect the idea of meaning to theistic belief. The point of these aims is partly to understand human nature, partly to put forward a theory of meaning, and partly to provide thoughts that readers can use to think about the meaningfulness of their own lives.

1 Why Should We Care about Meaning?

Human beings are hungry for significance. It is intolerable that life should consist of one darn thing after another. (Cottingham 2003: 32)

three stories Robert King was convicted of killing a fellow inmate in Louisiana State Penitentiary and was sentenced to life without parole. For a number of years, he was placed in solitary confinement in a six-by-nine cell. In describing his life there, he said, “I had the attitude that life had nothing more to offer me, nor could life get anything from me, for I had nothing. I felt I had done it all and, should I perish the next morning, so be it” (Aviv 2017: 58). In this quotation, King displays an acute indifference to finding meaning for his life. If someone were to have asked him whether he wanted to keep living, he probably would have shrugged his shoulders with a look of passive unconcern and remarked with resignation, “If I live, I live. If I die, I die. It doesn’t matter either way.” No doubt his circumstance contributed to his indifference. Still, it was genuine indifference. Steve was a college senior who was an actor in one of the college’s plays. At one of the rehearsals for the play, he evidently was not energetic enough in uttering one of his lines, for the director exclaimed, “Steve! Can you give that more oomph – like living . . . . You do like living, right?” Steve paused, cocked his head a bit, and with a reflective look on his face 8

Why Should We Care about Meaning?

9

that was characteristic of the philosophy major that he was, replied, “I can take it or leave it.” I did not know Steve well, but he often walked around with a perpetual, somewhat morose look on his face as though he was not too happy about anything. He seemed to be going through the motions of living without much actual desire for it. My third story is fictional. It involves Sheralyn, who, unlike Robert and Steve, likes living a great deal. In fact, she obtains a large amount of pleasure from nearly all that she does. She likes her work, she likes the weekend events she engages in, and she especially loves meeting new people at parties. At one party, Sheralyn meets a philosophically minded structural bridge engineer, who listens patiently as she describes numerous details of her job. When she appears to have finished, the engineer asks, “What do you like most about living?” This is a new question for Sheralyn, so she pauses for a bit, then says, “I like everything, actually, but I think I like talking to people I haven’t met the most.” The engineer nods, then asks, “What do you regard as the meaning of your life?” This question catches Sheralyn off guard, and she gets a puzzled look on her face. “I’ve never thought about that,” she says. “I just like things, and that’s enough.” Sheralyn’s indifference to meaning is different from Robert’s and Steve’s indifference. They do not appear to like much about life, whereas Sheralyn likes everything, though she never asks about the meaning of what she does. She simply coasts from satisfaction to satisfaction.

the question How should we respond to each of these people – to Robert, whose imprisonment in a bleak jail cell made it harder for him to find meaning; to Steve, who did not seem to like much of anything; to Sheralyn, who pursued a wide variety of pleasures but who never thought about their meaning and for whom the question about meaning felt irrelevant? One kind of response involves mentioning specific goals that each of these could pursue or a creative project that they could plan and engage in or a friendship that they could deepen. These are three of the standard ways of acquiring meaning that thinkers on the topic have adopted. It is possible that Robert, Steve, or Sheralyn would be attracted to one of these. But it is also possible that they need something more general, involving a reason for caring about any meaning at all. This more general response is the subject of Chapter 1.

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Religion and the Meaning of Life

I shall be using Blaise Pascal as a guide. Pascal declares that he is appalled at the fact that some people do not care about the meaning of their lives. After looking at the reason he gives for being appalled, which is based on human desires for meaning, I will introduce the religious themes of the book. Then I shall connect these religious themes to the central ideas in three major ethical theories – duty, happiness, and virtue – ideas that can be used in answering the question of Chapter 1. I will end with an exposition of the virtue of caring about meaning.

appalled The kind of people Pascal is appalled by are somewhat like Sheralyn: “those who live without a thought for the final end of life, drifting wherever their inclinations and pleasures may take them, without a reflection or anxiety, as if they could annihilate eternity by keeping their minds off it, concerned solely with attaining instant happiness” (Pascal 1995: 134 [#428]). These persons’ preoccupation with everyday pleasures prevents them from thinking about the long-term question of meaning. The pleasures may be legitimate, to be sure – pleasures derived from work, family activities, projects, weekend events – but constant immersion in them causes such people to neglect questions about their larger significance. The result is that, like Sheralyn, they simply coast from pleasure to pleasure. Of this neglect, Pascal declares, “[T]his negligence in a matter where they themselves, their eternity, their all are at stake, fills me more with irritation than pity; it astounds and appalls me; it seems quite monstrous to me” (129 [#427]). Pascal contrasts these neglectful persons with those who diligently search for meaning but do not find it. Perhaps these people read philosophical and religious books on meaning, along with popular books on how dying people cope with their impending deaths. They reflect on the question whether the bleak and mechanistic view of the universe that some say is entailed by modern science can be made compatible with meaning. They ask their friends about the meaning of their lives. In the end, though, they come up short: “Either there is no meaning or I cannot find it. Either human life is pointless or we humans are condemned never to know what the point of our lives is.” Toward people like this Pascal has compassion, not horror: “I can feel nothing but compassion for those who sincerely lament their doubt, who regard it as the ultimate misfortune, and who, sparing no effort to escape from it, make their search their principal and most serious business” (129 [#427]). Pascal also has hope for such people:

Why Should We Care about Meaning?

11

“As for those who approach it with absolute sincerity and a real desire to find the truth, I hope that they will be satisfied, and convinced by the proofs of so divine a religion which I have collected here” (133 [#427]). Unlike Sheralyn, such people are not indifferent to meaning. Their actions show that they care a great deal about meaning. This fact shows that the indifference Pascal describes is not the same as believing that life has no meaning or that we cannot know what it is. For one can care a great deal about whether life has meaning yet believe that there is no such meaning or that we cannot know what it is. People in this category would be disappointed, perhaps even distressed. They want life to have meaning, possibly even desperately, but cannot find it. Such people in this state might infer, with Jean-Paul Sartre, that life is a “useless passion” (Sartre 1956: 615) – a passion, that is, that cannot be satisfied. Why was Pascal appalled that some people say that they do not care about the meaning of their lives? He states his reason thus: “I do not say this prompted by the pious zeal of spiritual devotion. I mean on the contrary that we ought to have this feeling from principles of human interest and self-esteem” (129 [#427]). The feeling he is referring to is concern for the meaning of one’s life, and his appeal is to what he regards as a fact about human nature, namely, that people are naturally interested in the meaning of their lives. He is not appealing to duty or obligation. This means that Pascal’s use of “ought” in his statement – “we ought to have this feeling” – is not a moral ought. It is an “expectation-ought,” as in “Jeni ought to be at the volleyball game this afternoon, because she talks about volleyball so much.” We might not be puzzled if Jeni did not go to the afternoon game, but we would be puzzled if she never went to a volleyball game. We would not, however, go so far as to be appalled if she never went. We would, however, have this stronger feeling for something more significant than volleyball games. If Jeni has repeatedly expressed strong sentiments in favor of a certain presidential candidate but votes instead for a different one, we would be baffled, perhaps even appalled, at her uncharacteristic vote. She ought to have voted for the candidate for whom she expressed strong sentiments. This expectation-ought comes through in Pascal’s statement, “Nothing is so important to man as his state: nothing more fearful than eternity. Thus the fact that there exist men who are indifferent to the loss of their being and the peril of an eternity of wretchedness is against nature” (131 [#427]). Pascal is using “important” here in a purely descriptive sense and not a moral sense. It means “having a strong interest in something” or “being a central part of a person’s character.” He is saying that we

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humans possess a strong, natural drive to know the meaning of our lives, a drive that is central to our character. Matters of meaning are important to us in this sense, so it is baffling when people say that they are not interested in such matters. That would be like someone saying that they are not interested in eating or do not care whether they lose their sight. Similarly, Pascal says, it is contrary to human nature for people not to care about the meaning of their lives. They ought to care because such caring is part of human nature. The claims Pascal is making are: (1) We possess a natural drive to know the meaning of our lives. (2) One would expect that people who have a natural drive to know the meaning of their lives would care about knowing what it is. (3) Some people do not care about knowing what the meaning of their lives is. The third statement makes Pascal appalled, given that the first two are true. Pascal’s first claim, that we humans desire to know the meaning of our lives, states something vital and essential and weighty about human nature. From one perspective, then, it is baffling that some people are indifferent to their life’s meaning. There are, however, explanations of why people are indifferent, so from another perspective it is not quite so baffling as one might initially suppose. In fact, from this different perspective, it is not baffling at all. Everyone is indifferent to their life’s meaning from time to time, even those who profess to care deeply about it. The plain truth about us humans is that we are often acutely divided in our cares and concerns. We are pulled in opposite directions. Our passionate cares are undermined in various ways. Our fervent concerns are sometimes blunted. So perhaps the thing to say is that, given the truth that we humans do care about meaning in some way, it is only initially baffling when we say we do not. I want to support this initial bafflement by describing human desires for meaning, in support of statement (1). After doing this, I shall describe some causes of people’s indifference to meaning, in support of statement (3).

desires for meaning Pascal explicitly connected his claim about meaning to life after death. What appalls him is that some people do not care about their “eternity.”

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This is because he adopts the traditional Christian claim that people live after they die, forever, and that they will spend that eternity either in heaven or hell. Pascal is appalled that some people do not care where they will spend their eternity. In this chapter, I shall set aside this concern for one’s destiny after death. There might be people who care about the meaning of their lives without a thought about whether they will live after they die or whether they will be in heaven or hell. In fact, there probably are quite a few such people. I shall discuss desires for an afterlife in Chapter 7 and limit myself now only to desires for meaning, even if they are not accompanied by desires for an afterlife. The thesis of this section is that humans possess a number of desires that count as desires for meaning. Some are desires for certain intrinsic goods, and some are for right and valuable pleasures. It may be that people do not always explicitly think of meaning when they have these desires. However, if they were to pause and reflect on what is involved in having the desires, they almost certainly would say that they possess the desires because they want to have a meaningful life. Satisfying the desires, they would say, is just what gives them meaning. My aim in describing the desires is partly to spell out the vital and weighty thing Pascal says about human nature and partly to explain the initial bafflement we would have if someone were to tell us that they did not care about the meaning of their life. Desires for Intrinsic Goods Consider noncompetitive play. We engage in it not to win, not to show people how good we are, not to acquire some other end, but simply because we regard it as good. Marίa Lugones describes an instance of such play: We are by the river bank. The river is very, very low. Almost dry. Bits of water here and there. Little pools with a few trout hiding under the rocks. But mostly wet stones, grey on the outside. We walk on the stones for a while. You pick up a stone and crash it onto the others. As it breaks, it is quite wet inside and it is very colorful, very pretty. I pick up a stone and break it and run toward the pieces to see the colors. They are beautiful. I laugh and bring the pieces back to you and you are doing the same with your pieces. We keep on crashing stones for hours, anxious to see the beautiful new colors. We are playing. (Lugones 1987: 16)

Lugones and her companion are experiencing an intrinsic good – appreciatively observing the beautiful colors in the stones they are breaking. This experience is a component of the play and is engaged

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in solely because it is good, not for a further end. Other components of the play are good instrumentally, that is, good because of their valuable outcome. Picking up the stones and throwing them fall into this category. But the whole activity of playing is an intrinsic good because it is not motivated by wanting to acquire a further good. There is, in a sense, no reason for the play other than its goodness. And if we were to ask Lugones and her companion whether their play was meaningful to them, they would reply, “Yes, of course.” The same is true of other goods, such as an absorbing, bountiful, and enduring friendship. Such a friendship contains instrumental goods and results in further goods that we can easily name, but these facts do not make the friendship only an instrumental good. We value it for its own sake, meaning that we would value it even if it did not produce any further goods. And, as with play, we regard our friendships as one of the things that gives meaning to our lives. Some of our desires for intrinsic goods qualify as deep longings and yearnings. A longing is a certain kind of desire – a yearning, accompanied with an air of wistfulness, as in “Kristen felt a deep and wistful longing for an earnest and absorbing love.” To yearn for something is to ache for it with a high level of craving. To be wistful is to be pensive, and to have a tinge of melancholy – “Oh, if only I could have a deep and satisfying friendship.” For a longing to be deep is for it to be both important and central in one’s character. Sometimes the dividing line between a deep longing and an everyday, ordinary desire is rather thin, but this fact does not detract from the fact that we commonly distinguish the two. Most of us have probably had a deep longing for a passionate and exhilarating relationship with someone, perhaps with a specific person or with someone in general. This deep longing is connected to the longing for certain emotions – the intense satisfaction of knowing that one is loved, for instance, or the longing for freedom from inner turmoil. Nearly everyone yearns to achieve a valuable goal that is recognized by others. Everyone is creative to some degree, and some people have a burning and restless longing to express their creativity in a well-crafted artistic or literary endeavor or in the design of a beautiful backyard flower garden. Although everyone is driven by self-directed concern, it is probable that some people, perhaps nearly all people, have an earnest longing to give themselves away in certain specific ways – with their love or compassion or generosity – without wanting anything in return. This longing to give ourselves away may be part of a yearning for a relationship with

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something supernatural. This last yearning can, in fact, be for the intrinsic good of worshipping and revering the Divine One. The point of stating that we have these deep longings is, again, that those who have them would say that satisfaction of the yearnings gives meaning to their lives. The deep longings for intrinsic goodness are essentially longings for meaningfulness. Here is the important truth about human nature: we desire at least some of these intrinsic goods – not always, of course, but sometimes; and not always explicitly, but behind the scenes, or with a half awareness, or even without knowing what intrinsic good would satisfy the desire. The yearning that is a component of the restlessness that Augustine asserts humans have may fall into this last category: “You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you” (Augustine 1991: 3). It is true that we go through many a day not thinking about our restless yearnings or about the good of play, friendship, or love, but we do think of them from time to time. “Play, friendship, and love are good just because,” we might say to ourselves, though perhaps not explicitly. And this prompts a desire for them. Desires for Right and Valuable Pleasures I have a black acquaintance whose uncle was beaten to death with a brick under a bridge in Minneapolis by several white people just because they wanted to see a black person die. They probably got pleasure from doing so, but later they may also have experienced severe misgivings about that pleasure. I also have acquaintances, I am sure, who enjoy doing somewhat trivial things, such as counting fireflies on a warm summer day. (I have done this myself.) Some of them, perhaps all of them, wonder about the value of doing those trivial things. Sheralyn may have asked herself whether the pleasures that drove her life all had the same value. Many people, perhaps all, at some point in their lives have had desires to experience right pleasures and to avoid wrong ones, as well as desires to maximize valuable pleasures and to minimize trivial ones. These desires, too, when satisfied, are regarded by these people as giving meaning to their lives. Think again of Lugones’s noncompetitive play. It is not just the intrinsic goodness of the playfulness involved in noncompetitive play and the intrinsic goodness of the appreciative observation of the beautiful colors that make for the activity’s overall meaningfulness. It is also the delight in observing the colors and the elation that the playfulness produces that

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make for its overall meaningfulness. The meaningfulness of friendship, too, derives both from its intrinsic goodness and from the pleasures involved in it. These pleasures include the comfort of having someone to confide in, being glad to do things together, and satisfaction at being able to help when needed. The deep longing for a passionate and exhilarating relationship with another person is also a longing for something that is both intrinsically good and highly pleasurable. Both the goodness and the pleasure are involved when someone yearns to worship and revere a divine creator. In sum, humans take pleasure in experiencing intrinsic goods – contentedness, delight, satisfaction, exhilaration. When the desire for these pleasures is satisfied, one has a sense of meaningfulness.

baffled It is hard to imagine anyone not having desires for intrinsic goodness or right and valuable pleasures. So it is baffling, initially at least, for someone to say that they are indifferent to meaning. It is puzzling that Sheralyn says that meaning is of no concern to her. If, in fact, she desires to avoid wrong or trivial pleasures, she does care about meaning. It is puzzling that Robert did not care whether he lives or dies, though it is a good deal less puzzling because of the circumstances that likely constricted the satisfaction of his desire for meaning. Given human nature, it is possible to find in nearly everyone a desire for an intrinsic good or a desire for right and nontrivial pleasures. The reason, then, why we should care about meaning, in the nonmoral sense of “should,” is that we already do. Although this may sound somewhat odd, what it means, and what Pascal is getting at, is that we normally expect people to care about meaning. It would be strange if they said they did not. The proper reaction to such people, it would seem, would be to describe the desires and longings that people normally have and to point out that such people may really have these desires despite their declared indifference to meaning.

explanations of indifference There are, however, explanations for people not caring about meaning. This fact makes Pascal’s answer to the question of the chapter more complicated. I shall list some of the explanations for indifference, then explain how, despite these explanations, it is still baffling that people are indifferent to meaning.

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Busyness: Soren Kierkegaard listed busyness as a barrier to what he called “purity of heart,” which he described as a single-minded pursuit of “the Good” (Kierkegaard 1993b: 24–5; 1956: 53–4).1 For our purposes, we can regard it as an obstruction to caring about meaning. “Busyness is indeed like a spell,” Kierkegaard wrote (1993b: 67; 1956: 107). It diminishes attention to what matters most in life, so that the “true is continually forgotten more and more” (1993b: 67) and “slips more and more into oblivion” (1956: 108). People who are consumed by busyness, or who let themselves be consumed by it, do, indeed, have cares and concerns, likes and pleasures. But such persons do not ask about their worth. This is Sheralyn’s life – her busyness causes her not to ask whether any of her pleasures give her life meaning. Lack of Energy: To care about meaning requires a level of energy that people sometimes do not have. This is not physical energy, but what might be called “moral energy.” This kind of energy is exhibited in moral attention and alertness. With this energy, one does not become trapped into simply drifting along without a care for the worth of one’s desires, actions, and choices. Yet it is all too easy to let oneself become trapped in this way. Illness and Physical Exhaustion: Sometimes illness or physical exhaustion cause one to lack the moral energy needed to care about meaning. Suffering: Intense pain and suffering often narrow one’s consciousness so that one can scarcely think of anything but their pain and suffering. One’s preoccupation with the pain and suffering eclipse a concern for meaning. At the same time, it may be that intense pain and suffering increase one’s concern for meaning – one fights the pain so that one can have a meaningful life. Constricted Circumstances: Robert is a prime example of one who is in a constricted circumstance. It is harder, perhaps nearly impossible, to pursue one’s hopes and dreams in solitary confinement. Deep longings become blunted; desires for intrinsic goods fade. This is true to varying degrees of refugees, those living in economically depressed neighborhoods, people who are systematically discriminated against because of their race, gender, or ethnicity, those who have been trafficked, and people who are enslaved in some way. Though many in these categories hope for a meaningful life, and though some are prompted to find one because of their constricted circumstances, some no doubt have given up caring for one.2

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Depression: Sometimes depression gets so bad that one cannot get out of bed in the morning. The depression may be due largely to events over which one has no control – abuse from a parent, an extremely painful occurrence one has witnessed, a chemical imbalance in the brain, a tragic loss. These can produce so much emotional pain that the desires one has previously had for intrinsic goods and right and valuable pleasures are dramatically reduced or eliminated. During those extra hours in bed, a depressed person just does not care about anything. Unbelief in the Divine One: Not everyone who disbelieves in a divine creator is indifferent to meaning. But some are. They might ask, “Why should I care about meaning if there is nothing to give it meaning?” Given these seven explanations of indifference, it is probable that large swaths of people have experienced indifference at some point, including those who think of themselves as caring about meaning. Indifference is not limited to the Roberts, Steves, and Sheralyns, whom we might at first think of as being in the minority. Pascal’s division between people who care about meaning and people who do not is not so sharp as he or we might suppose. Should we, then, stop being baffled when people say that they do not care about the meaning of their lives? Yes and no. Yes, because these seven explanations show that not caring about meaning is a common occurrence. Most of the explanations of indifference seem to be part of human nature, at least in the sense in which depression, suffering, and other states are experienced by many people. If pure description is the only method by which we can know what counts as being part of human nature, then some, at least, of these seven explanations depict human nature as much as do descriptions of desires for intrinsic goods and for right and valuable pleasures. So we might well be skeptical if someone were to report that they were never indifferent to meaning. At the same time, no, we should not stop being baffled when people say they are indifferent to meaning. For one thing, the common distinction between an occurrence and a disposition is pertinent here. A person has an occurrence of being indifferent when they feel indifference, and a person has a disposition to be indifferent when they have a tendency or proclivity to feel indifferent. Thus, it is possible for someone to have a disposition to care about meaning even though at certain times they feel indifferent about meaning. A lack of moral energy, for example, may occasionally afflict a person who has a disposition to care about meaning. In such a case, we would be inclined to say that the disposition is what truly

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characterizes the person and not the occasional occurrence of not caring. So we would not be baffled at all when such a person occasionally feels indifferent. Furthermore, what I said about the descriptive sense of “important” in connection with Pascal is pertinent. A desire for intrinsic goods is important to a person in a descriptive sense if it is intense and if it plays a prominent role in the person’s character. A desire for intrinsic goods plays a prominent role in a person’s character when the person frequently uses the desire to evaluate other desires. So we would be baffled when a person for whom intrinsic goods have been important in this sense reports that they do not care about meaning. We would expect them to care – they “should” do so, given that meaning has been important to them. The inference from these two considerations is that if it can be shown that most or nearly all people have a disposition to care about meaning and that caring about meaning is important to them, as I believe it can be, then we would rightly be baffled, at least somewhat, when we learn of someone who says that they do not care about meaning. It is time to look at why we should care about meaning in the moral sense of “should.” It is also time to introduce the religious themes mentioned in the introduction because they are pertinent to the moral “should” question.

why we should care about meaning The central claim in this section is that certain religious themes provide a good reason to care about meaning. The religious themes, encapsulated in the following four statements, focus on the Divine One and on the connection between the Divine One and caring about meaning. (1) The Divine One created humans with desires for intrinsic goods and for right and valuable pleasures. (2) The Divine One desires that humans satisfy their desires for intrinsic goods and for right and valuable pleasures. (3) The Divine One created humans with the capacity to satisfy these desires. (4) Human satisfaction of desires for intrinsic goods and for right and valuable pleasures is itself an intrinsic good. The main point in these four assertions is that the description of human nature as desiring intrinsic goods and right and valuable pleasures is wed

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to the creative activity of the Divine One. In Pascal’s first reason for caring about meaning, this was not so. There was simply description of human nature. Here, however, human nature is said to be a product of divine creation. In particular, the Divine One placed desires for intrinsic goods and desires for right and valuable pleasures into humans. And this fact makes all the difference. This difference is spelled out in assertions (2)–(4): the Divine One desires that humans satisfy their desires for intrinsic goods and right and valuable pleasures; humans are able to satisfy the specified desires; and human satisfaction of these desires is intrinsically good, thus satisfying humans’ caring about meaning. Four points need to be made about these assertions. The first point involves a commonly held distinction between moral and nonmoral goods. Although the distinction is sometimes slippery, most people probably would think of compassion, generosity, and patience as moral goods, and going for a walk, noncompetitive play, and gazing at stars as nonmoral goods. The question here is, are both necessary to have a meaningful life? I am inclined to say yes. Moral goods certainly are. And without any nonmoral goods, one’s life would be much less enriched. So I will be assuming that the desires for intrinsic goods that the Divine One instilled in humans are for both moral and nonmoral goods, and that a meaningful life requires both goods in a judicious mix.3 A second point about these assertions is that meaning involves the satisfaction of certain desires. This is not a conceptual claim, but an experiential one. When we look at how humans regard the satisfaction of desires for intrinsic goods and right and valuable pleasures, we observe that such satisfaction is perceived as giving meaning. A good example of this is the transformation of Robert King, who changed dramatically when he was introduced, while still in jail, to the teachings of the Black Panther Party, an organization devoted to black equality during the civil rights era in the United States. A desire for justice was awakened in him through his contacts with the Black Panther Party, and he experienced satisfaction of that desire through his involvement with the party, and thus experienced meaning (Aviv 2017: 58). This connection between meaning and desire is embodied in Susan Wolf’s formula, quoted in the introduction, that “meaning arises when subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness” (Wolf 2010: 9). Objective attractiveness for Wolf is based on objective value, which is contained in my reference to intrinsic goods and right and valuable pleasures. Meaning arises when desires for objectively valuable states are satisfied.

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Wolf describes the nature of the desires on which meaning is based: A person’s life can be meaningful only if she cares fairly deeply about some things, only if she is gripped, excited, interested, engaged . . . . One must be able to be in some sort of relationship with the valuable object of one’s attention – to create it, protect it, promote it, honor it, generally to actively affirm it in some way or other. (Wolf 2010: 9–10)

It is not just any desire that counts toward meaning, Wolf states. It must be had fairly deeply, so that one is gripped, absorbed, or riveted by the objective value. The desire engages one in ways that other desires do not. It dominates one’s attention, at least at times, and moves one to promote and actively affirm the object of the desire, namely, an intrinsic good or a right and valuable pleasure. If Wolf is right, as I believe she is, the satisfaction of desires that confer meaning is subject to two constraints: the desires must be of some objectively valuable state, and the desires must have a certain intensity. The former prohibits meaning from being arbitrary, trivial, or pernicious, and the latter restricts meaning to strongly held desires. The latter also makes the pursuit of meaning a chief part of one’s life. Statements (1)–(4) put these human desires for objective value into a wider context: the Divine One created humans with the capacity to have strongly held desires for objective value, desires that could absorb their attention and rivet them. The Divine One created humans with the capacity to satisfy these desires and thus experience meaning, sometimes with keen delight and often with lasting contentment. A third point about the four assertions is that desires for intrinsic goods and right pleasures can be accompanied by two further desires: that other people also experience such goods and pleasures, and that by one’s own meaningful life others will be prompted to live meaningfully. When these two further desires accompany desires for intrinsic goods and right pleasures, they can be an especially strong motivator to care about meaning, as many people want to make some kind of lasting difference in the lives of others. A last point about the four assertions is that they put meaning into a personal context. The satisfaction of desires for intrinsic goods and for right and valuable pleasures is not just a matter of pursuing an abstract principle – an impersonal duty or an impersonal good. It is also a matter of wanting to do what a divine person desires us to do. If we accept the four statements, we recognize that we were made to satisfy the desires that the Divine One instilled in us. And because of this recognition, we do not want

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to displease our creator. Not wanting to displease our creator, though, is not our only motive for pursuing intrinsic goods and valuable pleasures, for we also believe that what our creator desires for us is good. So there is a fusion of the personal with abstract principle, a fusion of desiring to please our creator with believing that certain goods should be pursued just because they are good. These considerations show that there is a good religiously inspired reason to care about meaning. The reason involves the connectedness to a divine person that one experiences – believing that one has been created by such a person and desiring to satisfy the desires the creator has for one. Someone who cares about meaning in this way is “religiously motivated to pursue goodness,” to use John Cottingham’s phrase (Cottingham 2003: 74).

duty, happiness, and virtue The connection of caring about meaning to belief in the Divine One can be elucidated by the basic concepts in three major ethical theories: duty in deontological ethics, happiness in hedonism, and virtue in virtue ethics. I will not argue that one of these theories is correct, but only that advocates of each theory can give an explanation of the moral force of caring about meaning. Duty Pascal fits into this category when talking about caring about meaning. Our “chief duty,” he says, “is to seek enlightenment on this subject” (Pascal 1995: 128 [#427]). Pascal assumes that we can know that it is our duty to care about meaning, though he does not say how we can know. Other duty theorists do say how. Immanuel Kant declared that categorical imperatives, which enunciate duties, are “dictates of reason.” Deontological intuitionists state that humans possess an ability to intuit duties, that is, an ability simply to “see” them. This intuitionism is strikingly similar to moral sense theories, which state that humans possess a moral “faculty” that tells us what is right and what is wrong. This faculty is called a conscience by others. Some theistic deontologists assert that because the human mind has been blinded by sin, it can know duties only if a divine person reveals them to humans. I am not going to discuss these theories, except to say that if one believes that humans can know what their duties are, then

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the religious themes I have described provide a context for the assertion that it is a duty to care about meaning. The main idea, according to theist duty theorists, is that humans have duties to the supernatural person who created them. In particular, because the supernatural creator gave humans desires for intrinsic goods and for right and valuable pleasures, as statement (1) asserts, humans have a duty to try to know what these intrinsic goods and right and valuable pleasures are. And because this supernatural creator desires for humans to satisfy these desires for intrinsic goods and for right and valuable pleasures, as statement (2) asserts, humans have a duty to try to satisfy these desires. The two assumptions here are that humans have the capacity to satisfy these desires, as statement (3) asserts, and that satisfaction of these desires is intrinsically good, as statement (4) asserts. Notice that there are two duties here, not merely the simple “caring about meaning” to which I have been referring. One is Pascal’s duty “to seek enlightenment on this subject.” The other is a duty to live in a certain way, namely, to satisfy the desires for intrinsic goods and for right and valuable pleasures. Both of these count for caring about meaning. Pascal seems to adopt the second as well as the first. He declares that “all our conduct” depends on the conception of meaning we adopt (128 [#427]). This declaration presupposes that it is important what conduct we engage in, and this entails that we have a duty to engage in meaningful conduct. We have the first duty, to care about what is meaningful, Pascal seems to be saying, because we have the second duty, to do meaningful things. Some might object that duty cannot undergird caring about meaning because desires cannot be commanded. We do not have control over our desires, and whatever we do not have control over cannot be commanded. This is a standard objection to conceiving of desires as subject to duties. Immanuel Kant wrote that there could be no duties to have what he called “inclinations” because we cannot control our inclinations. “Love out of inclination cannot be commanded,” he wrote (Kant 1964: 67).4 This last claim, however, has often been simply assumed. If we look at the ways in which our desires are influenced, we can easily produce a list of ways in which we can affect our desires. We can, for instance, combat the causes of indifference in various ways. Some of these ways will, no doubt, have less efficacy than others. Still, the extent to which we can affect our desires is the extent to which we have control over them. And the extent to which we have control over them is the extent to which we have duties to acquire and develop them. This point, it might be added, is true of our actions as well. They, too, are in our control to varying degrees because they are

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affected, in varying degrees, by a wide variety of circumstances, events, and inner states over which we have little or no control. Any reason for excluding duty from inclination would also be a reason for excluding duty from actions. It is, accordingly, just as reasonable, duty theorists can say, to maintain that it is a duty to care about meaning as it is to say that it is a duty to act in certain ways. There is another way to embed duty into statements (1)–(4). If one’s life is richer when one exemplifies the intrinsic goods and right and valuable pleasures that the Divine One desires for us to exemplify, as I shall argue in Chapter 5, and if one has a duty to have a richer life, then one has a duty to care about exemplifying the intrinsic goods and right and valuable pleasures that the Divine One desires for us to exemplify. Against the claim that one has a duty to have a richer life, one might assert that it is simply better to have a richer life, not a duty to have one, and its being better to have a richer life does not entail that it is a duty to have a better life. Duty theorists, however, can say that the former does entail the latter when living a better life is embedded in statements (1)–(4). We have a duty to live as the Divine One desires us to live, namely, to pursue intrinsic goods and right and valuable pleasures. Because pursuing intrinsic goods and right and valuable pleasures leads to a better life, it follows that it is a duty to pursue that better life.

Happiness The advocates of maximizing happiness can also fit caring about meaning into their conception of what is central in the moral life. Typically such advocates adopt the thesis that an action’s being right or wrong is determined solely by the quantity and quality of happiness that is produced by the action. This is because they believe that happiness is the sole intrinsic good. Playing and friendship, two states that I previously labeled as intrinsic goods, are not really intrinsic goods, according to the advocate of maximizing happiness. They are good only because they produce happiness, or only because they just are happy states. If they involve more happiness, and a higher quality of happiness, than other actions or states, then it is our duty to pursue them. Statements (1)–(4) will, then, have to be recast, which can be done as follows: (1) The Divine One created humans with a desire to maximize happiness, both for oneself and for others. (2) The Divine One desires that humans satisfy the desire to maximize happiness.

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(3) The Divine One created humans with the capacity to satisfy this desire. (4) Human satisfaction of the desire to maximize happiness is intrinsically good; it is, in fact, the only intrinsic good. On the first set of statements (1)–(4), the chief reason the Divine One created humans was to maximize intrinsic goods and right and valuable pleasures. Meaning for humans involves doing these, and caring about meaning means caring about intrinsic goods and right and valuable pleasures. On the happiness recasting of statements (1)– (4), the chief reason the Divine One created humans was to maximize happiness. Meaning for humans, accordingly, involves maximizing happiness, and caring about meaning means caring about maximizing happiness. This happiness conception of caring about meaning can have the same personal element in it that is in the duty conception of caring about meaning – we want to care about meaning because we have been made with desires for meaning by a divine person who wants us to satisfy those desires. We do not want to disappoint this being. This religious setting makes for a richer life, which for the maximizer of happiness means more and better kinds of happiness. Virtue According to advocates of virtue, the central feature of the moral life consists of exemplifying virtues. In contrast to the advocates of duty and happiness, virtue advocates say that the important question about the moral life is not “what gives an action moral worth?” but “what kind of person should one be?” The answer is, the kind of person who possesses a variety of virtues. Because virtues are generally thought of as character traits, this answer means that the central feature in the moral life consists of having a certain kind of character, namely, a virtuous one. Statements (1)–(4) can be recast as follows: (1) The Divine One created humans with the desire to exemplify virtues. (2) The Divine One desires that humans satisfy the desire to exemplify virtues. (3) The Divine One created humans with the capacity to satisfy this desire. (4) Human satisfaction of the desire to exemplify virtues is intrinsically good.

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According to this third set of statements, meaning consists in becoming the kind of person who exemplifies virtues, and caring about meaning means caring about becoming the kind of person who exemplifies virtues. The religious setting of this virtue conception of the moral life adds, as with the other conceptions, a personal element to caring about meaning – the person who cares about exemplifying virtues will feel that in doing so they are fulfilling the desires of the Divine One. Each of these three ethical theories can, then, account for caring about meaning. This is different, though, from saying that they can account for meaning. For duty theorists, meaning seems to consist of fulfilling one’s duties. This, however, neglects nonmoral goods. Duty theorists would have to add nonmoral goods to fulfilling one’s duties to account for meaning, which is a rather odd combination for a duty ethical theory. Advocates of happiness have an easier time with nonmoral goods – they can simply say that meaning consists of whatever maximizes happiness, whether moral or nonmoral, if this distinction makes sense for the happiness maximizer. Virtue theorists, too, have an easier time, for they can say that meaning consists of both moral and nonmoral virtues. Among the latter are dispositions to enjoy noncompetitive play and to experience awe at magnificent natural phenomena.

the virtue of caring about meaning I want to suggest now that caring about meaning is itself a virtue – both caring about finding a meaning and caring about actually having a meaningful life. This is a suggestion that the advocates of duty and the advocates of maximizing happiness can find a place for in their conceptions of meaning, though their reasons for doing so would differ from those of the advocates of virtue. Advocates of virtue, however, have a long tradition in which the nature of virtue and particular virtues are extensively described. For this reason, the virtue tradition has an advantage over the duty and happiness traditions when linking virtue and meaning. Talk about particular virtues has never, or rarely, mentioned caring about meaning. So to make a case for caring about meaning being a virtue, I need to describe what caring about meaning would look like as a virtue. To do this I shall list characteristics of virtues that advocates of virtue from Aristotle onward have commonly attributed to virtues. This will show, I believe, that virtue is an important way to think about caring about meaning.

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Disposition: Virtues are often said to be dispositions such that if a person is in a circumstance that calls for exercising a given virtue, that person will, indeed, exercise that virtue, or least will be likely to do so. It is the same with caring about meaning. Though one cannot always be feeling care, one can still be said to have a disposition to care about meaning if one is likely to care about meaning in circumstances that call for doing so. This will be quite a few more times than for most other virtues, as the virtue of caring about meaning involves caring about virtues. Habit: Aristotle regarded virtues as habits: “Virtue of character (eˉ thos) is a result of habituation (ethos)” (Aristotle 2014: 23 [1103a16]). One does not have a virtue when one exercises it just once. Children, for instance, do not have the virtue of being skillful at making things if they are skillful only one time. They need to be skillful a number of times in a variety of situations to be said to have the virtue of skillfulness. The same is true for people who undergo a moral or religious conversion – they cannot be said to have cast off undesirable virtues and acquired new ones until the old ones cease being exercised and the new ones are repeatedly exercised. Caring about meaning, too, becomes a virtue only after one cares about meaning a number of times, that is, thinks about meaning with concern and makes an effort to work it out in one’s life. “We become just by doing just actions, temperate by temperate actions, courageous by courageous actions,” Aristotle wrote (2014: 23 [1103a34–1103b2]). In like manner, one becomes a carer of meaning by actually caring about meaning on appropriate occasions. There is, though, more to the habit of caring about meaning than simply exercising it a number of times. Like all virtues, it becomes ingrained in one’s character to a certain degree. It can be deeply rooted and well established, or it can be less so. When it is not deeply rooted, it can more easily cease to be a habit and become an occasional episode or cease being exercised altogether. When it is deeply rooted, it is not nearly as likely to cease being a habit. In both cases, interestingly, one can wrestle with it, or have a lapse, or even on occasion resist it. When one has a deeply rooted habit to do something, it is one’s “second nature” to do it – one does not normally deliberate whether to do it, even though one still intends to do it. This is true of the deeply rooted habit of brushing one’s teeth every morning. It is also true of a deeply rooted habit of caring about meaning – virtuous thoughts and emotions can be just as much a matter of habit as can overt actions. They, too, can spring forth naturally from the firmly held values of a person.

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Cultivated: Virtues can be cultivated because habits can be cultivated. Though we fall into some habits, we can deliberately foster others, though not usually by a one-time choice. Typically we use strategies that bring about the repeated exercise of the virtues. One way to cultivate virtues is to put ourselves into situations that call for a virtue to be exercised, with the intention actually to exercise it. Another way is to imagine ourselves exercising it – vivid images sometimes have the power to move us to action. Still another way is to associate with people who have the virtue, so as to let their virtue seep into us. These ways, or something like them, work as well for habits consisting of inner states, including caring for meaning. Inner States: Advocates of virtue maintain that the moral life is not just about overt actions, but is to a significant extent about motives, desires, attitudes, and emotions. Caring about meaning can be thought of as an emotion. Robert C. Roberts’s definition of an emotion as a “concern-based construal” (Roberts 2003: 64) enables us to see how this can be so. The inner state of gratitude, as distinct from the expression of gratitude, would consist of the construal that someone has willingly and freely benefited us, along with an openness to being benefited, plus a gladness that we have been benefited, and, in addition, an attachment to the one who has benefited us with something of a debt (Roberts 2003: 294–5). In like manner, caring, in general, would also be an emotion. It would be based on the construal that its object has value, along with a desire to seek the good of the one cared for. To care about the meaning of one’s life, thus, would be an emotion that consists of the construal that engaging in intrinsic moral and nonmoral goods is important, along with the desire to exemplify those goods in one’s life to a maximum degree. Tendencies to Act: It is sometimes asserted that emotions cannot be important in the moral life because they isolate one from action and are essentially inner focused. But this is far from the truth, which is that emotions often contain, or are associated with, desires to act. Compassion, for example, is not genuine unless it contains just such a desire.5 Caring about meaning, too, contains a desire to live meaningfully. This desire produces a tendency to act in certain ways. Moral Enrichment: Whereas the advocate of duty states that a meaningful life is essentially about doing duties, and the advocate of happiness states that a meaningful life is essentially about maximizing

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happiness, the advocate of virtue declares that a meaningful life is essentially about enrichment. This is the idea of exemplifying as many virtues as one can, especially important ones. The person who cares about meaning desires that her life be enriched in this sense. Important: Caring about meaning is an important virtue, a very important virtue, because living meaningfully is important. It is “a great good that one’s life be meaningful, and not just barely, minimally meaningful, but robustly meaningful” (Wolf 2010: 109). Caring about meaning should occupy a central place in a meaningful life. Given the truth of statements (1)–(4), this is where it belongs. Cultivating the virtue of caring about meaning, given these statements, is a response to the great good of living meaningfully and to the desire to please the Divine One. These features of caring about meaning show that it can be conceived to be a virtue. When it is so conceived, it is a significant answer to the question “why should we care about meaning?”

2 Boredom

How dreadful boredom is. (“A” in Kierkegaard 1987: 37)

Michael, a college sophomore, fell into incapacitating boredom one afternoon. The boredom had been building for the past several months until he finally realized that he didn’t like being in college. He had gone to college at the insistence of his mother and had gotten through his freshman year with pretty decent grades, though he didn’t think that the courses he was taking were contributing much to his life. But now, early in his sophomore year, he felt that there wasn’t any point in continuing. He didn’t, however, know what he wanted to do. The jobs he thought he could get did not interest him. His friendships felt distant. That an assignment was due in the morning in one of his courses did not move him to action. Nothing he was normally interested in seemed to matter much. Michael had never been depressed enough or in enough emotional pain to want to kill himself. But suddenly the thought “why should I keep living?” invaded his mind. It scared him. His heart beat fast. His palms became clammy. He recoiled from the thought of himself dead. “I have to get hold of myself,” he said to himself, almost out loud.

two kinds of boredom Michael seems to have had two types of boredom, one that Lars Svendsen calls “situative boredom” and one that he calls “existential boredom” (Svendsen 2005: 41–5). Situative boredom, which is a species of what I will call “everyday boredom,” occurs, Svendsen says, “when one is 30

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waiting for someone, is listening to a lecture or taking the train” (41), that is, in particular situations when one has lost interest in what one is doing. Existential boredom occurs when “the soul is without content and the world is in neutral” (42). This somewhat cryptic description is later stated more precisely by Svendsen: “While situative boredom contains a longing for something that is desired, existential boredom contains a longing for any desire at all” (42). Michael’s boredom started out as the everyday kind when he lost interest in his courses. This boredom could have been fairly easily remedied by convincing himself that he really did like doing schoolwork or deciding that he would rather do something else that interested him more. Everyday boredom is common on weekends – one doesn’t know what they want to do on a slow-moving Saturday or Sunday afternoon, so they look around for something that will interest them. Or one is at an evening event and after a while finds themselves wanting it to end because it is no longer satisfying. In this kind of boredom, one has desires but doesn’t know which ones to satisfy, or has lost interest in satisfying a particular desire. Existential boredom, however, occurs when one loses all of their desires. One becomes totally indifferent to everything – nothing is attractive, nothing interests, and nothing entices. Leo Tolstoy fell into existential boredom, or something close to it, during a crisis that afflicted him when he was fifty. He wrote, “My life came to a stop. I could breathe, eat, drink, and sleep; indeed, I could not help but breathe, eat, drink, and sleep. But there was no life in me because I had no desires whose satisfaction I would have found reasonable” (Tolstoy 1983: 27–8). Tolstoy was not indifferent to literally everything – he wanted to continue eating and drinking. He also undoubtedly wanted to keep himself warm and avoid bodily pain. Still, what he experienced can count as existential boredom because, except for survival desires, he did not have any other desires the satisfaction of which would have made his life meaningful. The key difference between the two kinds of boredom is that everyday boredom includes only a lack of particular desires, whereas existential boredom extends to a lack any desires, or nearly any. Sometimes the line between everyday boredom and existential boredom is rather fuzzy. The two kinds of boredom often feel the same. “A’s” description of boredom in Soren Kierkegaard’s Either/Or can apply to both types, depending on the extent of the boredom: “I don’t feel like doing anything. I don’t feel like riding – the motion is too powerful; I don’t feel like walking – it is too tiring; I don’t feel like lying down, for either

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I would have to stay down, and I don’t feel like doing that, or I would have to get up again, and I don’t feel like doing that, either. Summa Summarum: I don’t feel like doing anything” (Kierkegaard 1987: 20). “A” might not have felt like doing anything within a certain range of desires he could satisfy that day, in which case he is describing everyday boredom. Or he might have had no interest in doing anything, in which case he is feeling existential boredom. Some people who experience existential boredom are indifferent to the fact that they do not feel like doing anything, and others who experience it are concerned about that fact. In the first, unconcerned boredom, one is not bothered by not having any desires. In the second, concerned boredom, one is bothered by one’s indifference. This second case is Svendsen’s existential boredom, in which one wants to have desires while knowing that one does not have any. One is afflicted with ambivalence – though one is indifferent about doing anything (except for basic survival activities), one is not indifferent about being indifferent. One wants not to be indifferent. Michael seemed at first to be afflicted with unconcerned indifference – not interested in anything, and also not interested in the fact that he was not interested in anything. But the thought that he may as well be dead, given that he wasn’t interested in anything, frightened him into wanting to be interested in something, into “longing for any desire at all,” as Svendsen put it. At that point his indifference turned into concerned boredom, which prompted him to reevaluate his life. By way of contrast, a state of complete indifference, indifference even toward being indifferent, does not produce distress or fright because one does not care that one is not interested in anything. It is like the state a person is in when they say that nothing matters and it does not matter to them that nothing matters, or like the state in which one feels that their life has no meaning and does not care that this is so. This is a shrug of the shoulders about the fact that one shrugs their shoulders. One has no aversive reactions in such a case. But if one becomes interested in the fact that nothing interests one, everything changes. In this case, one cares about the fact that one does not care about meaning. It matters that nothing matters. A range of emotions can ensue. One such emotion is disappointment that reality is such that nothing interests one. The disappointment might become acute and turn into distress. One desperately wants something to matter, and one is tormented by not feeling that anything does. This desperate desire may prompt fright or even terror at being bored.

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Fright is a species of fear. When one is existentially bored, the object of fear is the fact that one has no desires. The mere fact that fear is present indicates that a meta-desire is also present, namely, the desire to have desires, which in this case involves the desire to have meaning. Moreover, the more intense the fear, the more intense the desire from which the fear is derived. Terror is based on a supremely intense desire. I experienced a fierce terror once. I had hiked to the top of Medicine Bow Peak in Southeastern Wyoming. The sky had been clear all the way to the top, but as I sat on a boulder at the peak eating a sandwich, clouds suddenly rolled in and thunder boomed nearby. Acutely apprehensive, I packed my sandwich and instantly headed down the totally barren trial, high above the tree line where there is no place to hide from thunderstorms. A sign at the trailhead had warned of death by lightning. If I was enveloped in a storm I could be killed in one, swift lightning stroke. During the hour and a half it took me to get below the tree line, I felt heart-beating terror. I unquestionably did not want to die. Similarly, someone who has a supremely keen desire to have desires will react with terror at the thought that they do not have any. These points connect to the discussion in Chapter 1 about desires for intrinsic goods and right pleasures. When one has an intense concern about the fact that one is not concerned about these desires, about the fact that one is bored with the good and the right, one will experience terror, as happened to Ivan Ilyich in Leo Tolstoy’s story, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, as we shall see in Chapter 9. It is not hard to picture people experiencing terror in this way, for most people, perhaps nearly all people, have a strong drive to be concerned with whether they have lived rightly. Arthur Schopenhauer connected boredom to a lack of regard for value in the way I have connected existential boredom to being unconcerned about intrinsic goods and right pleasures. “Being abandoned to boredom,” he wrote, “is a positive proof that, in itself, existence has no value; for boredom is just that feeling of its emptiness” (Schopenhauer 1974: 287). As it stands, Schopenhauer’s statement that boredom shows that existence is valueless seems too strong, for the feeling of its emptiness could result erroneously from some aspect of one’s inner state and not from existence itself. It would have been more defensible for Schopenhauer to have said that boredom shows that one regards existence as valueless – the “feeling of its emptiness” involves feeling that nothing has any value. This feeling is the same as not being concerned for intrinsic goods and right pleasures that I have connected with existential boredom, the same as not having a desire for these, and the same as being

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unconcerned for goodness in general, whether moral or nonmoral. Nothing is felt to have value. Svendsen regards such a state as like being dead: “Boredom is like some sort of death . . . . It is a death within life, a non-life” (Svendsen 2005: 40–1). It is as though one were not really alive. If one asks, “Not alive to what?” the answer is “Not alive to value,” to use Schopenhauer’s words, and “Not alive to intrinsic goods and right pleasures,” to use my words. When one is not alive to these, that is a kind of death, because, to use Pascal’s words from Chapter 1, human nature typically consists of being alive to value, being alive to intrinsic goods and right pleasures. For one not to be concerned about these is to be dead, in a way, because normally to be human is to care about these. Existential boredom also undermines the connection to the Divine One. It says, “I do not care about the Divine One’s desire that I care about intrinsic goods and right pleasures.” In this, too, existential boredom is a kind of death, for the Divine One’s desire that humans care about intrinsic goods and right pleasures, expressed in statement (4) in Chapter 1, is just the desire that humans be alive in a way that rocks, plants, and animals are not alive. For this reason, existential boredom is a religious reality. It is not simply a neutral phenomenon. One would not, of course, be bothered by being in a state of death if one had ultimate indifference. Perhaps one would not even feel that one was in a state of death. “Being dead while still alive” contains a disparaging connotation, and one would not feel this connotation if one were indifferent to one’s indifference. Nor would it bother one that one was not interested in the Divine One’s desires if one had ultimate indifference. There would be no dismay, fright, or terror. One would not use evasive tactics to try not to feel indifference, as one might with existential boredom. One would not have a desire to avoid the indifference. One would simply be content to remain indifferent. When, however, one experiences dismay, fright, or terror as a result of having fallen into existential boredom with its concern for being unconcerned, one might use evasive tactics to try not to feel the boredom. Or one might not try to evade boredom but face it head on with dread, agony, despair, rebellion, frustration, or suicidal impulses. Or, in facing boredom head on, one could regard it as a call from the Divine One and want to rise from it.

evasive tactics Here we can go to Pascal again, whose picturesque discussion of diversion is pertinent to evasion. He writes, “I can quite see that it makes a man

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happy to be diverted from contemplating his private miseries by making him care about nothing else but dancing well” (Pascal 1995: 41–2 [#137]). Dancing, Pascal declares, can be used as an evasive tactic that takes one’s mind off one’s miseries. Among these miseries is the pain that arises from boredom: “We think either of present or of threatened miseries, and even if we felt quite safe on every side, boredom on its own account would not fail to emerge from the depths of our hearts, where it is naturally rooted, and poison our whole mind” (40 [#136]). The pain produced by boredom, Pascal is saying, can be alleviated by diverting one’s cares to some physical activity. To drive home his point, Pascal states that no hunter would accept a hare as a gift, nor the gamer money. “What people want is not the easy peaceful life that allows us to think of our unhappy condition, . . . but the agitation that takes our mind off it and diverts us” (38 [#136]). Dancing, of course, is merely one instance of the nearly infinite number of activities that can be used to evade boredom. Two kinds deserve special mention: mental activity and moral or religious activity. Academic people – students, professors, and the educated – are prone to pride themselves on not succumbing to evasive tactics because they do not engage in the activities that nonacademic people generally occupy themselves with, such as watching copious amounts of television or fanatically following sports events. On the contrary, academic people often conceive themselves as reading important books and thinking great thoughts. Rarely does it occur to them that mental activity, even lofty and exemplary thinking, can be used just as easily to evade encountering boredom. It is not a protected or privileged pursuit. Nor are moral or religious activities. They, in fact, are especially inviting as evasive tactics because one can mistakenly believe that by doing something good and worthwhile one is automatically not falling prey to evasive tactics. One is, indeed, doing something good and worthwhile, but it does not thereby follow that one is not, by virtue of that fact, engaging in a particularly subtle evasive tactic. The truth is, as Svendsen writes, that “boredom leads to most things appearing to be a tempting alternative” (Svendsen 2005: 39). This declaration resembles the common existentialist theme that evading responsibility for living one’s life well is exceedingly enticing. Jean-Paul Sartre’s long discussion of bad faith in Being and Nothingness, a form of lying to oneself to evade responsibility for how one lives, presupposes that he regards bad faith as especially seductive (Sartre 1956: 86–116). Sartre writes, “If bad faith is possible, it is because it is an immediate, permanent threat to every project of the human being; it is because consciousness conceals in its being a permanent risk of bad faith” (1956: 116). Soren

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Kierkegaard adopts a similar claim when he refers to hiding in the “crowd” to evade accountability to the Divine One: “The most pernicious of all evasions is – hidden in the crowd, to want, as it were, to avoid God’s inspection of oneself as a single individual, as Adam once did when his bad conscience fooled him into thinking that he could hide among the trees” (Kierkegaard 1993b: 128; 1956: 185). Kierkegaard’s reference is to the Genesis story of Eve and Adam attempting to hide from the Divine One after they had done what the Divine One had prohibited them from doing (Genesis 3:8–13). Their very first reaction upon realizing that they had disobeyed the Divine One was not to approach the Divine One with contrition, but to flee from the Divine One in anguish and dread. This is a perfect picture of the human proclivity to try to obliterate the awareness of disinterest in what is good and right, to blot out the awareness of disconnection from the Divine One, and to obscure the awareness of the “death” that results from existential boredom. Given this proclivity, it may be that some people will have to say at the end of their lives that their whole lives were filled with evasions. This would fit Pascal’s pessimistic assessment, when speaking of diversion, that “All our life passes in this way” (Pascal 1995: 40). Because existential boredom is a religious reality, these evasive tactics are also religious or, better, antireligious. They are ways of avoiding an encounter with the Divine One, of putting the Divine One out of mind, of saying to the Divine One, “Stay away from me.”

dread, agony, despair, frustration, rebellion, suicide Instead of trying to obliterate the sense of existential boredom, one might, while being aware of the boredom, react to it with dread. In dread, one is apprehensive or anxious about something that is about to happen. Or one is reluctant to meet someone because of bad news one knows one is going to hear. With existential boredom, one dreads to face the fact that one has no desire for anything. One’s awareness of this could be only half conscious, in the background of one’s everyday thoughts, in which case one half-consciously dreads for it to become fully conscious. Dread can turn into agony, as it did for Tolstoy in his crisis of meaning at age fifty. His awareness of the fact that he had no desires whose satisfaction he would have found reasonable was a full consciousness, not just a half-awareness hovering behind his everyday activities. It insistently afflicted him numerous times each day. This prompted acute

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distress. “I was like a man lost in the forest who was terrified by the fact that he was lost,” Tolstoy reports (1983: 33). Tolstoy also experienced despair, with its complete absence of hope. “For a long time I carried on my painstaking search; I did not search casually, out of mere curiosity, but painfully, persistently, day and night, like a dying man seeking salvation. I found nothing” (33). This despair no doubt provoked frustration when he realized that he was not able to do anything about the dread, agony, and despair. He was frustrated when he thought that desires he wanted to satisfy would not satisfy him: “If I wanted something, I knew beforehand that it did not matter whether or not I got it” (28). Albert Camus’s Sisyphus almost certainly experienced despair and frustration before settling on rebellion. Sisyphus, according to ancient Greek legend, was condemned by the gods to roll a rock up a hill forever as punishment for having offended the gods. For the gods to have conceived of this endless, repetitive activity as punishment, they would have to have assumed that Sisyphus cared about doing worthwhile things. If he had not cared, he would simply continue endlessly to roll the rock with a mere shrug of the shoulders. With a high level of caring, though, his repetitive activity would become very painful – he would have despaired of ever doing anything worthwhile, such as building a beautiful structure at the top of the hill, and he would have become frustrated every time the rock rolled back down the hill. This despair and frustration surely would have been a severe punishment. How could Sisyphus have lived with this pain? He could not very well have engaged in evasive tactics, as his one activity, ordained by the gods, was in the forefront of his consciousness every moment of every day. He might have continued to remain in despair and frustration even though it would have meant constant pain. Camus, however, has Sisyphus rebel. Sisyphus can’t, of course, just stop rolling the rock. But he can adopt a stance of scorn toward the gods. He can shake his fist at the gods and curse them each time the rock rolls back down the hill. In so doing, he would be rejecting the gods, telling them that they are vindictive, spiteful, and full of wicked revenge. Thus, one “must imagine Sisyphus happy,” Camus writes (Camus 1983: 123). Camus’s explanation of this last statement is that “crushing truths perish from being acknowledged” (122). Rebellion should be distinguished from resigned acceptance, which consists of accepting the fact that one is helpless in the face of constant boredom, along with submission or capitulation. This is not indifference, because with indifference one has no wants or cares,

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whereas with resigned acceptance one wants not to be bored, yet reluctantly acquiesces to the fact that one is bored. With rebellion, however, there is no reluctant acquiescence, but total rejection of the boredom and its source. The rejecter rebukes and castigates the source of the boredom. This rejection, with its rebuke and castigation, is surely tormenting. But Sisyphus is said to be happy because of his scorn for the gods. He disdains them and has contempt for them. He has seen through their vindictive punishment of him and pridefully derides them. Yes, Sisyphus is happy because of his prideful contempt. But it cannot be a contented happiness. His scorn and rejection are hateful. Can an employee who scornfully rejects an arbitrary regulation imposed by their employer be contented? Can a teenager who scornfully rejects their parents’ unreasonable rule be contented? In a way, they can. But in a way they cannot. Sisyphus may exult in his prideful scorn, but he cannot be contented with it. What would this rebellion look like if it were directed toward the Divine One? The bored rebel would not be content with the Divine One’s desires for her. She would, in fact, defiantly scorn those desires. “I am doomed to a life of constant boredom, but I do not accept that,” she would declare, “and I certainly do not accept any remedies for it by a supposed divine creator. Who is this being who makes a world and lets people become bored beyond measure and then lamely proposes that we yield to its desires for us? I will never bow to that!” Though some people are allured by the prospect of rebellion’s scorn and contempt, others succumb to the pain of boredom and want to kill themselves. This is the reason, no doubt, that J. Jeremy Wisnewski called existential boredom a fatal boredom, a state in which all one’s desires have subsided and one no longer has any reason to continue to live (Wisnewski 2005: 32). After Tolstoy wrote that he was like someone lost in a forest and terrified because he was lost, he wrote: “This was the horror. And in order to be delivered from this horror, I wanted to kill myself . . . . The horror of the darkness was too great, and I wanted to be free of it as quickly as possible by means of a rope or bullet. It was this feeling, more powerful than any other, that was leading me toward suicide” (Tolstoy 1983: 33). Suicide, of course, would end the pain of existential boredom. But it would also end the possibility of rising above it.

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a call from eternity In his Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing, Soren Kierkegaard declares that repentance, regret, and confession are eternity’s emissaries to humans (Kierkegaard 1993b: 13–20; 1956: 39–48. The 1956 translation has “remorse” instead of “regret.”). By this he means that they are guides to seeking the Divine One. They beckon and call. Or, rather, the Divine One beckons and calls through them. Boredom and the threat of boredom can also serve as calls to awaken one so that one searches and investigates and reflects and pursues a better remedy for boredom than indifference, evasion, dread, agony, despair, frustration, rebellion, or suicide. Clearly, though, the possibility of being bored does not awaken everyone. So we must ask what the difference is between one for whom boredom is a divine call to be transformed and one for whom it is not. Here Kierkegaard’s descriptions of what needs to take place for one properly to be prepared for repentance, regret, and confession are pertinent. What needs to take place for one to be prepared for these is also what needs to take place for one to regard boredom as a call from eternity. Kierkegaard describes five states that are needed to recognize a divine call. If none of these are present, one will not be moved to change by the threat of boredom. These five states are “the concern of inwardness,” being willing to be transformed, enunciating what one is feeling, quietness, and a longing for the Divine One (1993b: 14–20; 1956: 40–8). In the concern of inwardness, or “inner agitation of the heart” (1956: 43), one desperately wants not to be bored yet fears that boredom could overtake oneself. Or one fears that one’s life has hitherto been without meaning, but wants this not to be the case. This agitation is unmistakably different from the shrug that characterizes indifference. With indifference, one is not moved by the prospect of boredom. Boredom is perceived merely as a possibility and not also as a threat, as it is when one is agitated. Willingness to be transformed also contrasts with indifference. At a relatively low level of willingness, one merely acquiesces to becoming different – “acquiesces” because one fears making substantial changes. One does not want to give up entrenched ways of acting and desiring because these ways have become old friends that are not parted with easily. Yet one clearly is dissatisfied with these old friends and wants to adopt new ways of living. One wrestles with the reluctance to become different. With a higher level of willingness, though, there is little wrestling or agitation. This kind of willingness springs from more intense caring about meaning. It is fervent and passionate. One instantly takes

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up the question of meaning upon encountering the possibility of boredom. One eagerly embraces new ways of meaningful living. Enunciating what one is feeling amounts to putting into words the vague and inchoate inner states one has when encountering the threat of boredom. One must “say what lies hidden in the depth of his soul” Kierkegaard writes (1993b: 20; 1956: 48). The aim is to be clear about what one is experiencing – when it is put into words, it comes more sharply into view. The aim is also to own what one is feeling. Combined with willingness to be transformed, enunciating what one is feeling enables one to avoid the evasive tactic of distancing oneself from one’s inner states – “It is truly I who am feeling threatened by boredom, not some unknown other.” About quietness, Kierkegaard states that when we are thinking of divine things, “the deeper the quietness the better” (1993b: 20; 1956: 48). To acquire this quietness, one must stay away from “the noisy main highway” (1993b: 20; 1956: 48). On the noisy highway, one can easily be distracted and engage in evasive tactics, so that one does not hear the Divine One call. The highway, of course, is ever so tempting. When one tries to resist it, the highway often wins. The most effective way to avoid the highway is to long for the Divine One so strongly that one is rarely tempted by it. When one longs for the Divine One, one more readily discerns certain events as calls from the Divine One. This idea fits Kierkegaard’s general view that the inner state one is in affects how one perceives an event. “Fundamentally all understanding depends upon how one is disposed toward something” (Kierkegaard 1975: 354). The instance of this phenomenon that he gives involves the interpretation of a misfortune that happens to one – one will interpret it differently if one is “trusting and full of faith” than if one is “despondent, broken-hearted, melancholic” (1975: 354). Another instance of the same phenomenon is, “When evil lives in the heart, the eye sees offense, but when purity lives in the heart, the eye sees the finger of God” (Kierkegaard 1990: 60). Kierkegaard is saying that there are no “raw data” or “brute facts.” All our experiences come filtered through interpretative psychological predispositions. All are interpreted by complex inner states, such as the five he mentions that are preparations for repentance, regret, and confession. Kierkegaard does not say whether this interpretation holds true for the typical cases used by logical positivists in the mid-twentieth century, namely, perceptions of cups, saucers, and other strictly physical objects. That is not his interest. His interest is in cases involving moral and

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spiritual experiences. They, at least, require the presence of certain dispositions, emotions, desires, and thoughts to interpret them in certain ways, or even, indeed, to have the experiences. The presence of these inner states makes it more likely that one will regard certain events as calls from the Divine One. This last fact, however, does not mean that the dispositions, emotions, and desires cause one indiscriminately to conceive just any event as a divine call. If the dispositions are of the right sort, they weed out some candidates for divine calls. This weeding out may make perception of such calls rare, but when they occur they may become turning points for caring about meaning. Evasive tactics may be recognized for what they are. Dread, agony, and despair may be occasions of transformation instead of permanent afflictions. What, then, is the difference between an activity that is used simply to evade boredom and one that alleviates boredom without doing so evasively? One difference is that in the latter a person genuinely regards an activity as intrinsically good. The absence of this regard is illustrated by Albert Camus’s scenario of a man wanting only to show off a woman at his side as they enter a restaurant. The man is merely using the woman to acquire admiration for himself instead of respecting her and valuing the intrinsic goodness of being with her. If he had previously been bored, he would be trying to alleviate boredom by treating the woman merely as a means to his own end instead of by valuing the intrinsic goodness of their presence together. He would be evading boredom illicitly. To alleviate boredom rightly, he needed to value their being together as intrinsically good. This valuing would have made his averting boredom legitimate. The ability to perceive significance in a wide array of activities also makes a difference between averting boredom legitimately or illegitimately. Kierkegaard speaks to this: “The person who is without God in the world soon becomes bored with himself . . . . but the person who is in fellowship with God indeed lives with the one whose presence gives infinite significance to even the most insignificant” (Kierkegaard 1993a: 78). The person who uses illegitimate evasive tactics to prevent boredom has little ability to discern a high level of significance in activities that might not otherwise be thought of as significant. But the one who perceives significance everywhere has little need of using illegitimate evasive tactics to avert boredom. One cannot be bored in the presence of the significant.

3 Denial of Death

The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else: it is a mainspring of human activity – activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny of man. (Becker 1973: ix) Death has a long reach, with an impact that is often concealed. (Yalom 2008: 7)

In his books, The Denial of Death and Escape from Evil, Ernest Becker argues extensively for the claim that nearly everything we humans do is motivated by our terror of dying. This terror, he claims, causes us to engage in “immortality projects,” activities that are aimed at securing our “place” in the world. Examples of immortality projects include both grand undertakings and everyday activities. They are endowed by us with the supposed power to give us cosmic significance and eternal life, Becker states. However, none of the immortality projects work, he says. That is, none of the “one-dimensional” immortality projects work. We die despite our efforts to cast ourselves as immortal. What is needed to find cosmic significance, Becker argues, is to engage in an immortality project that involves identification with the “transcendent.” In this chapter I shall explicate Becker’s concepts of immortality projects, vital lies, and rebirth, ending with thoughts on what death teaches us. My aim is to show both how the fear of death can prevent us from securing a meaningful life and how the fear of death can be an occasion for finding meaning. 42

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death with insignificance It is death with insignificance that terrifies us humans, Becker says, not just death: What man really fears is not so much extinction, but extinction with insignificance. Man wants to know that his life has somehow counted, if not for himself, then at least in a larger scheme of things, that it has left a trace, a trace that has meaning. And in order for anything once alive to have meaning, its effects must remain alive in eternity in some way. Or, if there is to be a “final” tally of the scurrying of man on earth – a “judgment day” – then this trace of one’s life must enter that tally and put on record who one was and that what one did was significant. (Becker 1975: 4)

The fear humans have toward death, Becker says, is only partly directed toward the possibility that one will become extinct. It is principally focused on the fact that one’s death could reveal that one’s life was not meaningful. Bedrock to Becker’s claims about fearing death with insignificance is his assertion that everyone wants to know that their life has meaning, that it has counted for something, that it has left meaningful traces. If one did not want to know this, if one did not care about the meaning of one’s life, one might be disappointed at becoming extinct, sad at not being able to keep on living, but there would be no fear. The source of the fear of death, Becker says, comes from the fact that to know whether one’s life has been significant, one must know that the effects of what one has done last beyond one’s death. And, presupposed by Becker, one must live beyond one’s death to know this. Extinction, then, means that one will not know what one desperately wants to know. This fact threatens one with ultimate tragedy, for it might be, unknown to one, that one’s life did not count for anything, did not leave a trace that itself has meaning. Or, states Becker in the preceding quotation, there could be a tallying up of one’s life that determines whether it has been significant. But, Becker is presupposing, this tallying could occur only after one has died. This would be the case partly so that the tally could be complete, but partly because it could be done only by a divine person who thoroughly knows about one’s life. Becker is presupposing that one has not been assured before one’s death that one’s life is significant. Death, accordingly, would be terrifying because one would not know what the final tally was going to be. That tally might show, again, that one’s life was wasted, which would be a final and absolute whole-life failure.

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immortality projects To fight the fear of death with insignificance, Becker says, our first response is to engage in immortality projects – activities that we think will make us heroes. “Heroism is the first and foremost reflex of the terror of death” (1973: 11). The aim of becoming a hero is to acquire a certain kind of power: “Power means power to increase oneself, to change one’s natural situation from one of smallness, helplessness, finitude, to one of bigness, control, durability, importance” (1975: 81). The reality of death shows that humans are small, helpless, and finite. But with bigness, control, durability, and importance, one can persuade oneself that death no longer has power over one. The thought of death fades away. It no longer haunts one like nothing else – it no longer haunts one at all. Becoming a hero, then, becomes utterly important, the central and consuming passion of one’s life. Becker mentions a number of activities that are designed to make one a hero in this sense. The acquisition of money is a prominent one: “In the power to manipulate physical and social reality money in some ways secures one against contingency and accident” (1975: 81). Money and property are thought not only to have the power to protect against this-world contingencies, but also the power to protect against the cosmic calamity of death with insignificance. Using the technology of the last two centuries also guarantees one’s immortality, so it is thought: “We live in a different power world than did the primitives. For us, motors, guns, electric circuits embody power” (76–7). His claim here is that one of the motives driving the advance of technology is to acquire power to overcome death. With technology one experiences a heightened sense of control over one’s life, so much so that it is but a short step to believing that one is immune from death. Engaging in immortality projects is not limited to pursuing high-level technological goals; it is done in mundane ways as well: “One has to be a hero in the best and only way that he can . . . ‘if only for his skill at the pinball machine’” (1973: 217. Quoting from Harrington 1969: 93.). Even arguing can be an immortality project: “No wonder men go into a rage over the fine points of belief: if your adversary wins the argument about truth, you die” (1975: 64). Because Becker is a cultural anthropologist, he integrates his claims about immortality projects into social realities: “Societies can be seen as structures of immortality power” (63). By this he means that filling specific social roles is a way of guaranteeing immortality: “Almost everyone

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consents to earn his immortality in the popular ways mapped out by societies” (1973: 170). Doing so is natural, as these ways are ready at hand – vocations, gender and racial roles, social position. One’s parents and one’s schooling constantly prepare one for these ways of acquiring immortality power. They provide, Becker says, “symbols of prestige that single [a person] out as especially worthy of being remembered” (84). Acquiring prestige and being remembered are, of course, ways of enhancing one’s cosmic status. To these thoughts of Becker, I want to add that one can pursue immortality projects by engaging in good activities, including fulfilling useful social roles, entering worthy occupations, creating beautiful gardens, or reading meaningful books. Kierkegaard’s thoughts about comparing oneself to others are pertinent here. In his Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing, he describes such comparing as a barrier to “willing one thing,” which he thinks of as single-mindedly pursuing what is good (Kierkegaard 1993b: 24–35; 1956: 53–67). When one compares oneself to others one nearly always thinks of oneself as superior to those others. One’s occupation is, indeed, worthwhile, but when comparison slips into one’s mind one begins to think of it as good because it is better than the occupations of certain others. Reading a good book is also truly worthwhile, but when one thinks of it as more worthwhile than “lower” activities, one is on the way to regarding the reading as bestowing a high cosmic status. Those who like to read good books are particularly tempted to engage in this kind of comparison. Irvin Yalom, an existential psychotherapist, caught himself doing exactly this: “I was taking a brief vacation alone at a Caribbean beach resort. One evening I was reading, and from time to time I glanced up to watch the bar boy who was doing nothing save languidly staring out to sea – much like a lizard sunning itself on a warm rock, I thought. The comparison I made between him and me made me feel very smug, very cozy. He was simply doing nothing – wasting time; I was, on the other hand, doing something useful, reading, learning. I was, in short, getting ahead” (Yalom 1980: 124). The tendency to think well of oneself by comparing oneself to others can be called the Reward Syndrome. In this, one pursues what is good to get the reward of thinking oneself superior to others. As Kierkegaard points out, though, when we do this, we are not really pursuing the good but something else: “If a man loves a girl for the sake of her money, who would call him a lover? After all, he does not love the girl but the money” (Kierkegaard 1993b: 38; 1956: 70). The reason Kierkegaard devotes a whole section of his Purity of Heart Is to Will

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One Thing to the Reward Syndrome must be, surely, that he believes that pursuing what is good for a reward is a common and nearly irresistible temptation. This thought is captured in Thomas Merton’s rhetorical question, “Who can do good things without seeking to taste in them some sweet distinction from the common run of sinners in this world?” (Merton 1972: 49). When Becker claims that many of our activities spring from the fear of death with insignificance, he is not saying that one is always conscious of using activities to deny death. In fact, he indicates that not many people are aware of what they are doing. By and large, people repress their fear of death: “Repression takes care of the complex symbol of death for most people” (Becker 1973: 20). Because Becker regards himself as something of a Freudian, he regards repression of the fear of death in a Freudian way – one unconsciously puts the memory of a painful experience out of mind. The memory does not disappear but goes underground, and because it is of a painful experience, it is hard to get at later. But it still affects one’s mental state and behavior, sometimes in major ways, which Freud wrote about voluminously. If one does not accept the Freudian conception of repression, one could simply say that, like other fears, the fear of death, when once acutely experienced, continues to affect the way one acts even though one is not aware of its doing so. Becker thought that a large part of what humans do is to evade the awareness of one’s fear of death: “Modern man is drinking and drugging himself out of awareness, or he spends his time shopping, which is the same thing” (284). “Drinking and drugging” are metaphors for a wide array of activities that obliterate the awareness of one’s fear of death with insignificance. It is supremely important to notice that when Becker says that one’s first response to the fear of death is to engage in immortality projects, he has in mind activities that are “one-dimensional.” These he contrasts with “otherworldly” or “transcendent” activities: “Modern man cannot endure economic equality because he has no faith in self-transcendent, otherworldly immortality symbols; visible physical worth is the only thing he has to give him eternal life” (1975: 85). In this Becker makes it clear that people engage in immortality projects because they do not have faith in a transcendent, divine person who can bestow meaning. He also makes this point clear in his discussion of the use of romance in immortality projects: A modern human needs “to feel heroic, to know that his life mattered in the scheme of things . . . . If he no longer had God, how was he

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to do this? One of the first ways that occurred to him, as Rank saw, was the ‘romantic solution’: he fixed his urge to cosmic heroism onto another person in the form of a love object” (1973: 160). Modern humans, Becker is presupposing, do not believe that there is a divine person who can ensure their immortality and give them meaning. At this point, Becker introduces self-deception. At some level those who pursue these one-dimensional immortality projects believe that they can stave off death with them. Yet they also know, again at some level, that they cannot stave it off. They are, accordingly, lying to themselves. Their immortality projects are simply illusions. The illusions, however, are needed, Becker states, to avoid the absolute and terrifying fact of death. Illusions are like the evasive tactics one employs to avoid boredom – they prevent one from experiencing dread, agony, and despair. The presupposition in all this, to say it again, is that one utterly, intensely, and desperately needs to believe that one’s life has meaning.

vital lies The phenomenon of self-deception seems paradoxical, as the subject who lies is also the subject who is deceived. Explaining how this can be so would take us too far afield, so I will only say that the phenomenon becomes plausible with the idea of levels of awareness – one is only vaguely aware that one’s immortality projects will not work. Most instances of self-deception involve this lower level of awareness. Sometimes, though, one is fairly aware that immortality projects are ineffective, yet hangs on to them for sheer life. The clearest time this occurred to me was when I learned that Ivan Ilyich, in Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, was just forty-five years old when he died. Somehow, inexplicably, that produced in me a terror so acute that my heart thumped and I gasped for breath. Forty-five was only a few years off. I, too, could die then. I had been familiar with the common existentialist distinction between thinking about death in the abstract and feeling the reality of one’s own death. I had read statements such as Kierkegaard’s that it is “only a jest if [one] contemplates death and not himself in death, if he thinks of it as the human condition but not his own” (Kierkegaard 1993a: “At a Graveside,” 73). I had prided myself on the fact that, unlike the common run of humanity, I had been one who had felt his own death. I had not been fooled into thinking I had done so merely because I had thought about death abstractly. Yet on that afternoon in my early forties I learned that I had never truly felt that death was something that could

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happen to me. And when I gasped for breath because of the sharp, almost violent, terror that came upon me, I instantly exclaimed to myself, “No, I will not die then.” Instantly, again, I saw this for what it was – a lie fabricated solely to ward off the terror. In spite of that humiliating and deflating realization, I continued, in desperation, to believe the lie. This incident illustrates precisely Becker’s claim that the lies one tells oneself about death through one-dimensional immortality projects are “vital,” which, he says, are “a necessary and basic dishonesty about oneself and one’s whole situation” (1973: 55). The reason one needs to be dishonest with oneself is because “the real world is simply too terrible to admit; it tells man that he is a small, trembling animal who will decay and die. Illusion changes all this, makes man seem important, vital to the universe, immortal in some way” (133).1 Becker is making three major points: the very thought of one’s life being without significance is intolerable, this unbearable thought prompts a frantic pursuit of meaning, and one grasps at just about anything to satisfy one’s thirst for meaning, even if it is “false” or trivial or valueless or illusory. As a result of the frantic pursuit of meaning, illusion is felt to be a comparatively small price to pay for quelling fear, anxiety, and dread at the prospect of a meaningless life. Becker is, in essence, making the observation that, given the acute need for meaning, one is likely to fall for something that is entirely wrongheaded without realizing that one has done so. These points are made in the context of Becker’s claims about death – everyone is haunted by the fear of death, and the fear of death lies behind nearly everything everyone does. Death brings the pursuit of meaning into sharp focus. And it does so for everyone, prompting a desperate and frequently illusory quest for meaning. For those who are skeptical of Becker’s claims about the universality of the fear of death and its prominent role in human activity, I want to point out that one can adopt the three major points Becker makes about the pursuit of meaning without adopting his claims about the fear of death. There are numerous other conditions and events that are also highly effective in producing meaning projects, including boredom or failure or hearing about someone who is living a particularly meaningful life or reading a profound novel or having to make a major life decision. Perhaps Becker focused on death because it is strikingly effective in inducing reflection about the meaningfulness of one’s life. Or perhaps he focused on it because the prospect of death so often produces terror. Terror, of course, must be managed. One can scarcely live with it for

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long. What Becker noticed about such terror management is that it often consists in “denying” death in some way. He also noticed that this denial motivates large swaths of human activity. In this, I think he is right. The very idea of death, the fear of it, haunts many humans, and it is a prominent motivator for a fair amount of what humans do, sometimes consciously, though probably mostly unconsciously. Most humans desperately want to convince themselves that their lives are significant, and a fairly large proportion of these feel the need to do so by regarding themselves as not being thwarted by death. Becker is right to say that the fear of death is prominently and intimately connected to what most people regard as the most important and central passion of life, namely, to possess meaning.2

rebirth Given that most humans, according to Becker, are immersed in false immortality projects and in lies about meaning and death, it is not surprising that he also declares that a radical change is needed: “One must die and be reborn” (1973: 57). He is not, of course, referring to literal death but to a cessation of one’s proclivity to pursue one-dimensional immortality projects and to lie to oneself about meaning and death. This cessation strikes at the center of one’s character, for one’s immortality projects are prompted by one’s most basic desires and are part of one’s selfconception. The death and rebirth that are needed to acquire the right meaning involve entrenched features of one’s character. This last point prompts Becker to declare: “As Frederick Perls put it, ‘to suffer one’s death and to be reborn is not easy.’ And it is not easy precisely because so much of one has to die” (57). The death that Becker is referring to requires valuing the truth about oneself more than the comfort that lies deliver. Friedrich Nietzsche famously declared that it is a significant issue whether or not one should value truth. “Suppose,” he wrote, “we want truth: why not rather untruth?” (Nietzsche 2000a: 199 [Part One, Section 1]). The problem of the value of truth, he said, “involves a risk, and perhaps there is none that is greater” (199 [Part One, Section 1]). The risk of knowing the truth about oneself is, indeed, great, for one might fall into agony and despair when believing that one really will die. As a result, it is easy, extraordinarily easy, to go for the lie. As Nietzsche noted, the issue of the value of truth is not merely an esoteric, philosophical issue, but a life-sustaining one: “The falseness

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of a judgment is for us not necessarily an objection to a judgment . . . . The question is to what extent it is life-promoting, life-preserving” (201 [Part One, Section 4]). Nietzsche is after two points: it is an important question whether one should prefer truth, and human nature often prefers what it conceives to be life promoting and life preserving rather than truth. Because of this second point, one of Nietzsche’s main aims in his writings is to awaken self-awareness. “We are unknown to ourselves . . . strangers to ourselves, we do not comprehend ourselves, we have to misunderstand ourselves” (Nietzsche 2000c: 451 [Preface 1]). Becker could have written this Nietzschean declaration – we have to misunderstand ourselves, because believing the lie about ourselves with one-dimensional and this-worldly immortality projects feels as though it is the only way to promote and preserve our lives. Truly to live, however, the part of one that desperately wants to believe the lie has to be excised, cut out, die. And one must be aware of this part before it can be excised. Kierkegaard spoke to this when he said of all that he had written, “I want to make people aware so that they do not waste and squander their lives” (Kierkegaard 1995: 411). Kierkegaard certainly had in mind the awareness of oneself that Nietzsche and Becker are urging one to have. Becoming aware of oneself presupposes that one is open to selfknowledge. Thus, openness is an essential element of Becker’s conception of rebirth. One must be open to the truths that one will die, that one is tempted to believe that one can stave off death by becoming a onedimensional cosmic hero, that one, indeed, wants to be the only and ultimate cosmic hero. To be open to these truths means to be willing to believe them without ultimately succumbing to them. It is not enough, however, to be open only to these unappealing truths about oneself. One must also be open to the truth that, despite the bent toward false hero projects, one also truly wants pure goodness, not tarnished with the ulterior motive of being a cosmic hero or with Kierkegaard’s Reward Syndrome. This is the truth that, although one has a proclivity to use what is good to magnify one’s status or compare oneself favorably to others, one in addition desires to exemplify and experience intrinsic goods without wanting to use them for ulterior ends. Neither Nietzsche nor Becker emphasized or even said much about being open to goodness. Nietzsche seems to have had an inclination to observe what is unsavory in people. His natural aptitude to discern what lies behind a person’s exterior, he wrote, “furnishes me with psychological

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antennae with which I feel every secret: the abundant hidden dirt at the bottom of many a character” (Nietzsche 2000b: 689 [Section 8]). In an interview with Becker as he lay dying of cancer, he was asked about the almost complete negative tone of Escape from Evil and The Denial of Death: “You seem to overstress the terror of life and undervalue the appeal. Life . . . is both dreadful and desirable” – to which Becker replied, “Well, all right. I think that is very well put, and I have no arguments with it” (Keen 1974: 74). Being open to the truth that life is good and desirable is vastly important, as without it one would be locked in despair and agony with only the notion that life is dreadful. Three things are involved in becoming open to the goodness of life, each of which is necessary for rebirth: increased attention to what is good, redirection of one’s root desires, and humility. The important truth about attending to what is good is that doing so draws one to it. Plato noticed this. In The Republic, the true philosopher is said to gaze on the form of the Good, partly because the true philosopher already loves what is good but also partly because attending to the Good keeps the true philosopher loving the Good. And those who are being educated for goodness in Plato’s ideal community are shown instances of goodness so that they will be drawn to goodness. Although Plato does not explicitly articulate in a single sentence the connection between attention to the Good and attraction to it, Simone Weil does: “If we turn our mind towards the good, it is impossible that little by little the whole soul will not be attracted thereto in spite of itself” (Weil 2002: 117). The idea in this first requirement for rebirth is that one must cultivate the sometimes submerged and half-hidden desire for pure goodness by letting one’s attention to it captivate one. The result will be that the desire for it becomes stronger and more prominent in one’s life. How can one tell when the desire for goodness becomes stronger and more prominent in one’s life? Two ways: introspection and action. By introspection one can discern that the desire for goodness has become more prominent in one’s inner life. More concretely, one can notice that the desire occupies a greater amount of one’s conscious awareness and that one uses it to assess one’s other desires. Introspection, however, is sometimes fallible. One must supplement it with a survey of one’s actions. A desire for goodness is often (but not always) tightly connected to certain actions – a desire to have gratitude, tolerance, mercy, gentleness, and humility often exhibits itself in expressions of these. If these expressions are never present, one needs to wonder how strong the desire is or whether it is even

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present. If the expressions are present often, one has some confirmation of the strength of the desire. A second requirement of becoming open to what is good is a redirection of one’s root desires. This involves desiring intrinsic goods for their own sake instead of for the cosmic heroism one thinks one can get from favorable comparisons. It involves desiring to pursue the important rather than the trivial. These desires for what is intrinsically good and for what is important must become central to one’s character and to one’s selfconception. One must also recognize the exceedingly strong temptation to do things to bolster favorable comparisons or to pursue the trivial instead of the important. Without this recognition, one will not know what one is fighting. One will be more likely to succumb to the almost irresistible desire to compare one’s agility, expertise, or accomplishments favorably to others, or to do what is trivial so as to procrastinate doing what is important. Humility is a third requirement of becoming open to what is good, because it lessens the attractiveness of one-dimensional immortality projects. The essence of these projects is to regard oneself larger than one is. Humility is not the same as having a deprecatory sense of oneself, but an accurate sense. It opposes having an inordinate opinion of one’s merit or importance, which is precisely what is involved in pursuing immortality projects. This is the reason that Becker asserted that “the best sign of the genuineness of that cure is that [one] lives with humility” (1973: 58). Living with humility is the best sign that one has set aside one-dimensional immortality projects because one knows that one is finite and cannot save oneself from death. What everything in Becker’s analysis of human nature is leading toward is this – to experience rebirth, one must be open to the transcendent. This is the openness to believing that there is something beyond oneself that can overcome death and give a genuine, lasting, meaning. This openness is missed by a number of commentators on Becker’s thought, who focus on the management of terror that death provokes as the central organizing principle of human personality. (See the Ernest Becker Foundation at ernestbecker.org for some instances of this.) In this, they say, rightly, that Becker has seen something that Freud and other major personality theorists did not notice. They do not mention, though, that Becker also thought that a key element, indeed, the key element, in terror management was religious, namely, to cast oneself onto the transcendent. Part of the reason for not mentioning this may be that Becker does not say much about the transcendent or its nature. Yet he says enough to make it

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clear that he believes that the only way to find meaning, without succumbing to illusion, is through the transcendent. In addition to the two previously mentioned quotations about one-dimensional immortality projects, he declares, “Primitive Christianity is one of the few ideologies that has kept alive the idea of the invisible dimension of nature and the priority of this dimension for assuming immortality. Thus it is a threat to any one-dimensional immortality ideology . . . . Early Christian radicalism rumbles under the one-dimensional obsessiveness of modern industrial life” (86). When these quotations are combined with further quotations, it becomes clear that when Becker is thinking of the transcendent, he is thinking of a divine person. The only way we can satisfactorily believe that we will escape death, Becker states, is to identify with “something higher” than all of the unworkable ways of acquiring immortality (120). This something higher is not susceptible to the ravages of death and decay. It is invisible (258–9), an “absolute measure of power and value” (195), “a transcendental support for one’s life” (200), “independent of living external rituals and customs” (200), and a “Higher Majesty” that dubs one a knight of faith (258). In addition, in his death-bed interview, Becker states, “When you finally break through your character armor and discover your vulnerability, it becomes impossible to live without massive anxiety unless you find a new power source. And this is where the idea of God comes in” (Keen 1974: 79). Becker is not simply theorizing when he makes these statements about the transcendent. He was trained as a strictly empirical cultural anthropologist, and for many years, he said, “I was an atheist” (79). At some point, he changed: “I believe in God” (78). Along with his explicit identification as a Christian (Bates 1977), these quotations show that all that Becker has said about denying death through onedimensional immortality projects, vital lies, and rebirth is conceived by him to be religious. The impulse for meaning is religious, succumbing to illusion is religious, and the only escape from death with insignificance is religious. Death teaches us, he is saying, that we humans must regard ourselves as essentially religious creatures and that we should regard our confrontation with death as what Irvin Yalom calls “an awakening experience”: “Death awareness may serve as an awakening experience, a profoundly useful catalyst for major life changes” (Yalom 2008: 30). To regard one’s confrontation with death as an awakening experience is, from a religious perspective, to regard it as a Kierkegaardian call from eternity.

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what death teaches us What Becker and Yalom are doing is ingeniously turning the fear of death on its head and saying, “Instead of letting the fear of death control our lives, let us ask what we can learn from the fact that we will die.” Paul Moser does the same: “Death can enable a needed learning curriculum for us” (Moser 2013: 484). One lesson, Moser states, is that we need outside help if we are to overcome death with insignificance. Death “shows that we are fragile and even ultimately hopeless on our own. Death announces that we need outside help for lasting satisfaction and meaning” (484). The outside help, of course, cannot be what Becker is calling one- dimensional. It must be transcendent, else it would have no power over death. This lesson about our ultimate fragility brings another, Moser says: “Death is the intended wake-up call to this humbling lesson” (484). To think that we ultimately are on our own is exactly the opposite of humility, whereas to recognize our true condition, that we have no power over death, is precisely the sign that Becker states is the best sign that one has been reborn. With this lesson of humility comes still another. Death teaches us that we must trust, depend on, and rely on the Divine One. “In trusting God,” Moser writes, “I commit to dying to my own selfish ways to live to God’s ways” (485). Here, again, is a state that is directly opposite onedimensional immortality projects, which are essentially selfish, because they are intended by us to enlarge ourselves beyond what we really are. The absolutely vital lesson that death teaches, Moser states, is that we need to give up our “persistent tendency to play God” (485). This is precisely what one-dimensional immortality projects are intended to do, namely, to endow ourselves with the power that only a transcendent creator has. However, to trust in the Divine One, who has made us, “is the refusal to play God” (485). Soren Kierkegaard, too, declares that death can teach life-transforming lessons. A person who frequents the grave of a friend practices “in his life the earnest thought of death, so that he [is] halted and halted again in order to renounce vain pursuits” (Kierkegaard 1993a: 77). Some of these vain pursuits involve what Kierkegaard calls “dissimilarities,” conditions that are used to make people feel exalted and more important than others: “good fortune and honor and wealth and beauty and power” (90). Death, however, teaches that all are equal, and this lesson incites us to regard ourselves as equal to others before God. “The earnest thought about the equality of death” helps us “to renounce worldly comparison and to want to seek the equality before God” (91). This equality before the Divine One

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is based on one’s true worth as a beloved creature of a divine creator, not on illusory, one-dimensional immortality projects. Looking at boredom and death are first moves in an existential approach to meaning. The idea is to consider experiences that are intimately connected to the pursuit of meaning. The next chapter will describe four important ways in which meaning can be pursued.

4 Acquiring Meaning

There are many ways to live a good life. (John Ames in Robinson 2004: 3)

This chapter describes four ways of acquiring meaning that have been espoused by various philosophers. A thesis of the chapter is that each of the four ways is legitimate. No one of them is exclusive of the others. My aim is also to connect the four ways of acquiring meaning to the religious themes in Chapter 1. Here my thesis is the modest one that, although these ways of acquiring meaning are espoused by nontheists, they are compatible with theism. This is the background for arguing in Chapters 6 and 7 that believing in the Divine One and in life after death enhances each of these ways of acquiring meaning. In addition, my aim is to show that each way is made richer when accompanied by relevant emotions. This claim has not often been made by philosophers of meaning, partly because emotions have often been neglected or devalued by philosophers. Emotions, however, are one of the prime features that gives life its richness.

emotions Robert Solomon states that emotions constitute meaning: “Emotions are the meaning of life. It is because we are moved, because we feel, that life has a meaning. The passionate life, not the dispassionate life of pure reason, is the meaningful life” (Solomon 1993: ix). Solomon claims, more strongly, that “human life has its meaning in our passions and nowhere else” (14–15). The idea of “nowhere else,” however, is too 56

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narrow. It is truer to facts about meaning to say that emotions are connected to achieving goals, being creative, acquiring virtues, and giving and receiving love, namely, to the four ways of acquiring meaning described in this chapter. Meaning is found in the blending of these ways with emotions, and sometimes just in emotions. They are always necessary, and sometimes sufficient, for meaning. It may be that Solomon would concur with this last statement – he may simply be overstating his claim to emphasize it. Solomon says that meaning involves emotion because he adopts a certain conception of emotions. Emotions, he says, are not sharply distinguished from reason: “Passions are not to be separated from reason; they are welded together into a single unit” (15). This is so because “emotions are judgments, not blind or irrational forces that victimize us” (15). A more nuanced way to put the point that emotions are judgments is to say, with Robert C. Roberts, that they are concern-based construals (Roberts 2003: 64). Angry people construe themselves as having been wronged by someone. Joyful people construe themselves as being in circumstances that promote their well-being. These construals are conceptual and therefore not blind – we conceive our emotions as having definite objects. They are rational in this sense and not nonrational or irrational, as the detractors of emotions sometimes assert. Emotions also do not victimize us. That is, we are not simply passive recipients of them, unable to control them. Emotions, Solomon writes, “do not just happen to us, but we are responsible for them. We practice them, cultivate them, and in many cases choose them, even if unconsciously” (Solomon 2007: 190). Choosing emotions, Solomon makes clear, is not a matter of deliberate, bare willing, nor of having a “free and unconstrained choice” to adopt “any emotion at all” (191). Acquiring certain emotions is complex, involving various features of our personality along with the circumstances we are in. Despite this complexity, we can take steps to become “co-authors” of desirable emotions (192). These two features of emotions contrast with a large segment of the philosophical tradition regarding emotions, epitomized in Immanuel Kant’s assertion that inclinations are “blind and servile” and in his assertion that they are “always burdensome to a rational being” (Kant 2015: 96, 95). They are neither blind nor servile, Solomon declares, nor are they unwelcome. Not all emotions are welcome, of course, especially those that detractors of emotion sometimes mention, such as frenzy, wild lust, bitterness, envy, and consuming anger. But numerous emotions are welcome, such as “joy and exuberance” (Solomon 2007: 264), love, delight,

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and gratitude. A highly meaningful life is one that possesses a “richness” that “is predominantly a product of the passions” (1993: 7). What Solomon means by “richness” can be characterized as an abundance of interlocking, rightly valued emotions. The idea is that people who possess an abundance of such emotions have a more meaningful life than those who do not. Solomon, then, makes two claims: emotions are necessary for meaningfulness, and more of the right emotions enhance whatever meaning one has. Both of these seem true to me, and I shall mention them when describing the four ways of acquiring meaning, beginning with two that are associated with the myth of Sisyphus.1

achieving a goal In the myth of Sisyphus, mentioned in Chapter 2, Sisyphus was condemned by the gods to roll a large rock up a hill, only to have it roll back down again, forever (see Camus 1983: 119–23). Let us ask, What was Sisyphus experiencing as he got the rock to the top of the hill and then as he saw it roll back down, again and again? We must assume, of course, that Sisyphus had the desire to get things done, to succeed at projects that he set his mind to. Not succeeding at a project would have made him frustrated. So for Sisyphus to roll the same large rock up a hill, again and again, with nothing to show for it, would have made him eternally frustrated. Just as he approached the top of the hill each time, he would have felt a sense of imminent and happy achievement. Then, when the rock rolled back down, he would have felt immense frustration that the achievement had yet again been thwarted. He would have returned to the bottom of the hill with a renewed sense of anticipation, which was frustrated again when he got back to the top. Perhaps his frustration increased with each effort – the gods, being clever, would not have told him that the rock would roll back down each time, else Sisyphus were to develop indifference instead of frustration. It is eternal and increasing frustration that would have been his punishment – the frustration at not being able to get anything done, or as commentators have noted, at the pointlessness of what he was doing. He would have felt that his life had no meaning, which for Sisyphus, with the normal human desire to be doing something meaningful, would have been increasingly emotionally painful. On this reading of what Sisyphus experienced, one remedy would simply be for the rock to stay at the top and then for Sisyphus to roll another rock to the top and then many more rocks. In this way he

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could build a structure consisting of an arrangement of the rocks. He would get something done and therefore would not be frustrated, so that he would feel that his continued existence in the underworld had meaning. Richard Taylor reads the myth of Sisyphus in this way and suggests this remedy. Because Sisyphus’s labors “come to nothing,” Taylor says, they are meaningless (Taylor 2000: 322). The remedy is for Sisyphus’s labors to produce something. “If we supposed that these stones, instead of rolling back to their places as if they had never been moved, were assembled at the top of the hill and there incorporated, say, in a beautiful and enduring temple, then the aspect of meaninglessness would disappear. His labors would have a point, something would come of them all” (322). Other writers on the meaning of life adopt a similar way of acquiring meaning. Susan Wolf states that “a meaningful life is one that is actively and at least somewhat successfully engaged in a project (or projects) of positive value” (Wolf 2013: 308). She arrives at this way of understanding a meaningful life by depicting several types of meaningless lives, one of which is “the bankrupt person.” This person is engaged in pursuing projects that ultimately fail. If one devoted one’s whole life to a project that turned out, in the end, not to succeed, then this person’s life would be futile. So, says Wolf, “it seems necessary that one’s activities be at least to some degree successful” (308). Brooke Alan Trisel adopts a similar way of acquiring meaning. One’s life would be meaningless if it were pointless for that person to achieve any goals – pointless, that is, in the sense of being futile. “Declaring that an action or activity will be futile means that it will be impossible or highly improbable that the action, no matter how often it will be repeated, will bring about one’s envisioned goal” (Trisel 2013: 432). But someone who can accomplish worthwhile goals is not living a pointless life. And, Trisel states, “People do accomplish many of their goals: they graduate from college, they get married, they pursue various careers, they write books, they travel, and so on” (432). So, according to this way of acquiring meaning, one can have a meaningful life by successfully pursuing goals. The goals, of course, must be intrinsically good, or a means by which intrinsic goods can be acquired, for them to give one’s life meaning. Without this condition, one would only think that their life was meaningful. Although neither Taylor nor Trisel say anything about emotions that need to accompany the pursuit of goals, Susan Wolf does in her statement, quoted in Chapter 1, that “a person’s life can be meaningful only if she

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cares fairly deeply about some things, only if she is gripped, excited, interested, engaged” (Wolf 2010: 9). This is not the place to discuss differences between emotions, feelings, and desires. All these are needed for achieving goals to be meaningful. To drive home this point, imagine a human-looking creature that is devoid of all emotions, feelings, and desires. When it does things, it would have no excitement. It would not be gripped by what it does. Its facial expressions would be nondescript. Its bodily comportment would exhibit only machinelike efficacy. Can we also imagine that this robotlike creature’s activities are meaningful to it? This rhetorical question lies behind Wolf’s statement – a person could not be said to have a meaningful life if the goals she or he worked toward were without accompanying emotions, feelings, and desires. Now imagine an emotional hermit, one who has shut herself off from experiencing a wide array of emotions. Perhaps her family of origin has been largely devoid of emotional expression. Or she may have been chided when expressing certain emotions and so has learned not to be too “emotional.” Because this person has a limited range of emotional experiences, she would have little to no excitement about achieving goals. She would be like the emotionless humanoid in other ways as well – her facial expressions would be bland, and her bodily comportment would display little animation. It is hard to imagine such a person having no emotions, feelings, or desires, but there certainly would be very little of Wolf’s being “gripped, excited, interested, engaged.” In such a case, her life would be only minimally meaningful, even if what she did were intrinsically good. Suppose the emotional hermit were to undergo a transformation. Though it may take a long time for her to become comfortable with having emotions, feelings, and desires, when she does, she becomes excited when pursuing worthwhile goals. She cares about the goals she works toward. She anticipates having pride when attaining them, and then enjoys the pride she experiences when they are attained. With pride there is likely to come growing self-confidence plus a sense of having value, which in turn can prompt aspiration to pursue other goals. All these contribute to the rich meaning of which Solomon speaks. Taylor, Wolf, and Trisel all adopt a goal approach to acquiring meaning without reference to belief in the Divine One or life after death – these beliefs are not needed to have a meaningful life, they say. Wolf, though, states that the goal approach to acquiring meaning is compatible with belief in the Divine One: “Those who think that God is a necessary grounding for these assumptions [about worth and meaning] and who

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believe in Him may still find my account of meaning acceptable” (Wolf 1997: 215). A believer in the Divine One will, indeed, find a goal approach to acquiring meaning acceptable, by believing that the Divine One instilled in humans a strong desire, plus the capacity, to achieve intrinsically good goals, as exemplifications of statements (1)–(3) in Chapter 1. A believer in the Divine One could also believe that the Divine One instilled in humans a desire, plus the capacity, to have emotions that accompany goal achieving, again, as exemplifications of statements (1)–(3) in Chapter 1. These emotions would also have to be intrinsically good, or a means by which an intrinsic good can be acquired, for them to count as part of a complex of meaning that includes goal achievement. A believer in the Divine One certainly could believe that the emotions accompanying goal achievement are intrinsically good. This first way of acquiring meaning is, accordingly, compatible with belief in a divine creator. An Objection Arthur Schopenhauer famously thought that achieving goals did not confer meaning. The problem with achieving goals, he thought, is that once one achieved a goal, one would become bored because the achievement of the goal was behind one. Schopenhauer puts this objection in terms of needs and wants: “That human existence must be a kind of error, is sufficiently clear from the simple observation that man is a concretion of needs and wants. Their satisfaction is hard to attain and yet affords him nothing but a painless state in which he is still abandoned to boredom” (Schopenhauer 1974: 287). The needs and wants are what fuel the achievement of goals. One needs to see flowers bloom in the spring, so one plants daffodil bulbs. One wants to hike to the very top rock of a mountain, so one plans and trains. These are the projects of Susan Wolf, the envisioned goals of Brooke Alan Trisel, and Taylor’s point of one’s labors. Schopenhauer asks, “What happens when the project is completed, the envisioned goal is attained, and the end product of one’s labors is achieved?” His answer is boredom. Boredom is what initially prompted one to adopt needs and wants – “Behind need and want is to be found at once boredom” (287). And boredom is what results from the satisfaction of one’s needs and wants when a project is completed – “But as soon as this comes to a standstill, the utter barrenness and emptiness of existence become apparent” (287). Life, according to Schopenhauer, is a perpetual series of attempts to stave off boredom by pursuing projects and goals, only to discover that their achievement, when the pursuit of the

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goal “comes to a standstill,” produces more boredom. One is a victim of the illusion that achieving a goal produces meaning, when in fact it extinguishes meaning. Life turns out to be the constant motion of satisfying needs that gets us nowhere. We humans, Schopenhauer declares, “are kept in motion merely by want and illusion” (287). Kieran Setiya regards Schopenhauer’s analysis of achieving goals as an accurate depiction of midlife crises, his in particular, and believes that the best response to Schopenhauer’s critique of achieving goals is to pursue what he calls “atelic” goods. “Accomplishments matter to me,” Setiya says, “but each one is bittersweet: longed for, pursued, and ultimately, disappointingly, complete. That’s over with. What now?” (Setiya 2017: 128). In response to Setiya’s “What now?” one is tempted to say, in accordance with the goal way of acquiring meaning, “Pursue more goals. Keep accomplishing things.” This, however, will not do, Setiya states: “Whatever is wrong with the pursuit of goal after worthy goal, it will not be cured by prolonging that pursuit forever” (129). The reason constant pursuit of new goals will not confer meaning is that it consists of a cycle of pain and boredom. Pursuing goals, remember, is fueled by desire, and, declares Setiya, “It is painful to want what you do not have” (132). This thought mirrors Schopenhauer’s critique of desire: “All willing springs from lack, from deficiency, and thus from suffering” (Schopenhauer 1969: 196). This suffering “can be fully compared to an unquenchable thirst” (312). The mere fact that one desires to pursue goals, according to Setiya and Schopenhauer, is painful. Achieving goals, however, does not alleviate this pain, the two assert. For, instead of being delighted, Setiya says, “you are aimless and depressed,” “restless and unfulfilled” (Setiya 2017: 131, 128). Schopenhauer states that if one “lacks objects of willing, because [one] is at once deprived of them again by too easy a satisfaction, a fearful emptiness and boredom comes over [one]” (Schopenhauer 1969: 312). In different words, if one has satisfied one’s desire to achieve a particular goal, one feels empty and bored again because one no longer has the desire to achieve a goal. If, however, one calls up a desire to achieve another goal, Schopenhauer asserts, then one “swings like a pendulum to and fro between pain and boredom” (312), and, Setiya states, “That is no way to live” (Setiya 2017: 135). It is, though, the way Setiya had been living, which produced his midlife crisis: “I have spent four decades acquiring a taste and aptitude for the telic, for achievement and the next big thing, for personal and professional success – only to feel the void within” (135).

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The correct response to midlife crises, to the incessant motion of the pendulum of want and illusion, pain and boredom, is, according to Setiya, to introduce “atelic” activities into one’s life. Atelic activities have no goals, do not “aim at a point of termination or exhaustion, a final state in which they [goals] have been achieved and there is no more to do” (Setiya 2014: 12). Taking a walk without a destination is an example, Setiya says, and so is listening to music or hanging out with friends or family (Setiya 2017: 134). By contrast, Taylor’s emendations of Sisyphus’s repetitive activity – building a beautiful temple – involve what Setiya calls “telic” activities, those in which there is a goal, a temporal end, a terminal state. For Taylor, the point of life is to achieve goals. Setiya, however, declares that if achieving goals is the only point of one’s life, one is likely to become afflicted with a sense of emptiness: “What do they add up to, after all?” (Setiya 2014: 14). If one has an “excessive investment in telic activities,” one will have a “feeling of repetition and futility” (14). And one will have a morally inferior life. “There is a normative defect in your life if the activities that give it meaning, the ones that matter most to you, are telic ends” (16). This sense of normative defect is what produces a midlife crisis, Setiya maintains, a state in which one is acutely sensitive to questions of meaning and in which one wonders whether there has been any point to one’s life. The remedy, he infers, is to invest “more deeply in atelic ends” (15), without, however, eliminating telic activities (see also Setiya 2017: 133–42). Setiya’s suggestion is good. Philosophers of meaning often simply assume that meaning is conferred by engaging in goal-aiming activities, and it is easy for nonphilosophers to make the same assumption. “Meaning” seems to mean “having a purpose,” and having a purpose seems to mean “having something at which one aims” – an end product of what one does. But, as Setiya rightly observes, some meaning-conferring activities do not aim at anything. They are good even if one does not get anything done by engaging in them. Parts of the third and fourth ways of acquiring meaning described in this chapter fall into this category. There is, however, something odd about Setiya’s suggestion that atelic activities should be added to one’s life without thereby giving up goalaiming activities, given that he has accepted Schopenhauer’s critique of goal-aiming activities. Presumably the pain and boredom that goalachieving activities involve would still exist even if one invested in atelic activities in addition to goal-aiming activities. Setiya has not shown or even claimed that adding atelic activities to one’s life eliminates this pendulum of pain and boredom. The most that he has shown is that the

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overall assessment of one’s life changes when atelic activities are added to it – the pendulum of pain and boredom is now not the only thing one relies on for meaning. One no longer has “an excessive investment in telic activities” (140). So one’s life is, overall, not as unsatisfactory as it would be if one pursued only goal-aiming activities. It is now a mixture of satisfaction resulting from atelic activities and dissatisfaction resulting from goal-aiming activities, perhaps even a new pendulum swinging back and forth between the two. But this, too, is no way to live. The truth about us humans is that we possess an irresistible impulse to pursue goals. And we regard such pursuits as giving our lives meaning. So Schopenhauer’s and Setiya’s critique of goal-aiming pursuits must be met head on instead of addressed merely by adding atelic activities. This can be done in several ways, first by dealing with the charge of pain, then with the charge of boredom, then by introducing intrinsic value. Both Schopenhauer and Setiya seem to assume that the lack involved in desire is always painful: “All willing springs from lack, from deficiency, and thus from suffering” (Schopenhauer 1969: 196) and “It is painful to want what you do not have” (Setiya 2017: 132). This is true, however, only of some desires, namely, those that one knows cannot be satisfied. It is, indeed, painful, in varying degrees, to want what one knows cannot be gotten. However, desires for which there is a reasonable expectation of satisfaction typically produce anticipation, and sometimes a high degree of delightful expectancy. To be sure, there may also be some discomfort along with the anticipation, discomfort at not yet having achieved the goal and perhaps at wondering whether it can be achieved. But typically this discomfort is not regarded as rising to the level of a pain that one would want to avoid. It is often regarded as a “happy discomfort,” because it propels one toward a desirable goal. So the first response to Schopenhauer and Setiya is that though some desires may involve pain, other desires need not involve pain, and typically desires for goals do not. When a goal has been achieved, Schopenhauer says, the pain of desire leaves and one immediately becomes bored. This assertion presumes, however, that one does not have any other worthwhile goals one wants to pursue. Boredom would not occur if one did have other projects one wanted to pursue. And often one does have other such projects. So boredom is not a certain effect of finishing a project, as Schopenhauer and Setiya maintain. At the same time, they are right to point out that boredom can, indeed, result from finishing at least some projects. A prominent instance of this occurs when one is so consumed with projects of a certain kind that when one project of that kind is finished, one falls

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into acute boredom because one is uncertain about whether there are other projects of that kind worth pursuing. Academics who invest much energy in writing books and articles are particularly liable to succumb to boredom after finishing them. So is anyone who derives the core of their identity from achieving specific kinds of goals, academic or not. Without further goals of that kind to pursue, boredom strikes these people. A remedy for this boredom, as I have indicated, is to have other goals that one values. To say that the remedy is to engage in atelic activities, as Setiya does, is to presume that there is something wrong with pursuing goals. There is, indeed, something wrong with simply pursuing goals, as Setiya points out, but it is not something that is wrong with the activity of pursuing goals. Pursuing a variety of worthwhile goals is not to be on one pendulum swing after another. It is, rather, to use Taylor’s metaphor, to be setting stones beside each other and on top of each other to create a beautiful arrangement. This is because pursuing a variety of goals consists of movements from having desires to experiencing satisfying achievements and then to anticipating pursuing other goals, with the overall aim of making one’s life worth living. It is not the back and forth of pain and boredom. Or at least it need not be. There is another way to prevent boredom from striking when a goal has been achieved, one that is recognized, but rejected, by Schopenhauer: “Behind need and want is to be found at once boredom. . . . This is a consequence of the fact that life has no genuine intrinsic worth, but is kept in motion merely by want and illusion” (Schopenhauer 1974: 287). The right response to this is to regard one’s goals as having intrinsic worth or to be important means to other goals that have intrinsic worth. With this recognition comes satisfaction, perhaps even enthusiastic excitement, especially when one later calls to mind that one has been successful in achieving a particular goal. Here memory, an atelic good, plays a role in a meaningful life. With memory, one adds appreciation of the goodness of one’s own activities to the goodness of the activities. The appreciation, of course, must not be prideful, but fair and honest, bringing contentment. Its presence means that completing a project is, in a way, not the end of the project’s value, for one can appreciate the project as long as one lives. These responses to Schopenhauer’s and Setiya’s rejection of goal-aimed pursuits do not, of course, mean that everyone, or even most people, believe that their goal-aimed pursuits are meaningful. It might be, first, that they are doubtful whether they can achieve certain goals, in which case they will experience some degree of discomfort when desiring to achieve them. It might be, second, that they have no other goal-aiming

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activities that they regard as worthwhile, in which case boredom will strike them after they have achieved certain goals. Or it might be, third, that they are doubtful whether the goals they desire to achieve have intrinsic value or are important means to goals that do have intrinsic value. The extent to which one or more of these is the case is the extent to which one is justified in being pessimistic about acquiring meaning through goal-aimed pursuits. It is one of these three, most likely the second or third, that is responsible for one’s midlife crisis, not simply how deeply one is “hooked on the lure of the telic” (Setiya 2017: 138).

creativity Another feature of the myth of Sisyphus is the repetitiveness that Sisyphus is made to undergo by the gods. He has nothing to look forward to – no adventures, no creative undertakings, no variations in his daily routine, no surprises. Nothing novel brightens his day. On this reading of Sisyphus’s activity, we can imagine Sisyphus saying, just as the rock starts to roll back down the hill, “Oh, no. Not this all over again.” We can picture him being stung by the frustration of not being able to anticipate or create any new event. The gods, of course, would rub their hands with perverse glee at this, for they know that Sisyphus, like all humans, needs novelty, in particular, novelty that he creates. As punishment for offending the gods, he must endure unrelenting and uncontrollable repetitiveness, along with its attendant emotions, forever. Richard Taylor, in an earlier article, had read the myth of Sisyphus in this way in addition to the previous way. For Sisyphus to acquire meaning, he says, we must imagine that he “not only moves this prodigious quantity of stones to the top of the hill, but that he does so for the very purpose of seeing them converted to a beautiful and lasting temple. Most important of all, this temple must be something of his own, the product of his own creative mind, of his own conception, something which, but for his own creative thought and imagination, would never have existed at all” (Taylor 1987: 681). It is not just achieving a goal that gives meaning to what Sisyphus does, Taylor says. It is that Sisyphus is creative in achieving the goal. This creativity is “what gives our lives whatever meaning they have” (686). Creativity, Taylor states, “exists in degrees and is, in one form or another, far from rare” (683). Activities in which creativity can be exemplified include “gardening . . . , woodworking . . . , witty conversations . . . , the composition of clear and forceful prose . . . , the making of a poem of great beauty or depth of meaning . . . , and the raising of a beautiful family” (683).

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This way of acquiring meaning, like the previous way, must surely be based on a deep human need, else there would be no satisfaction in it. Irvin Yalom presupposes the reality of this need when he writes that “to create something new, something that rings with novelty or beauty and harmony, is a powerful antidote to a sense of meaninglessness” (Yalom 1980: 435). If creativity is a powerful antidote to a sense of meaninglessness, then part of one’s desire for meaning must include a deep desire for being creative. It is this that makes creativity a plausible candidate for meaning. Much of what I said about emotions, feelings, and desires with respect to achieving a goal can also be said about this creativity way of acquiring of meaning. Without certain emotions and desires, creativity would be barren and desolate. Imagine, again, a human-looking being that pursues goals in surprising and creative ways but without the excitement, care, or delight that one would typically expect in a creative human. Would we say that this being has any meaning? Would we say that an emotional hermit who has a minimal amount of emotions, feelings, and desires has a maximal level of meaningfulness? A believer in the Divine One could also believe that the Divine One has instilled in humans the desire and the capacity to be creative and that the Divine One desires that humans satisfy this desire, echoing statements (1)–(3) in Chapter 1. So this second way of acquiring meaning is also compatible with belief in the Divine One, which means that there are now two ways of having a meaningful life within a theistic framework. It is important to observe that it is not creativity for the sake of creativity that Taylor and Yalom say gives life meaning. It is creativity in producing beauty: something akin to a “beautiful and lasting temple,” as Taylor puts it, and something that “rings with . . . beauty and harmony,” as Yalom puts it. Creativity, then, is not by itself sufficient to bring about meaning, but must be combined with one of the other ways of acquiring meaning. It must be used, that is, to bring about intrinsic goods. It is also important to say, contrary to Taylor’s claim that creativity is “what gives our lives whatever meaning they have” (Taylor 1987: 686), that noncreative activities can have intrinsic worth, including repetitive ones. Repetition is sometimes disparaged through the use of such phrases as “mindless repetition” or “pointless repetition,” as if repetition must always be mindless or pointless. However, some repetition, indeed, a good deal of repetition, can be mindful and have a point. Large swaths of human experience consist of repetition, much of it regarded as meaningful. Goal-aiming activities, for instance, can often be repeated with

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just as much meaning the second and third time, or even the eleventh or twenty-ninth time, such as baking cakes or creating gardens. So can activities falling into the next two categories of meaning – exemplifying virtues and emotions, and giving and receiving love. However, Taylor and Yalom are right – a life without any creativity would be impoverished. Its presence from time to time enriches one’s life.

virtues and emotions In her The Sacred Depths of Nature, Ursula Goodenough explicates “religious naturalism,” which asserts that nature is all there is, but which is also receptive to virtues that are commonly associated with being religious. The “Epic of Evolution,” Goodenough says, is the “grand, compelling story” from which we extract meaning, and which can prompt “deep and abiding spiritual experiences” (Goodenough 2013: 370). From the perspective of evolution, we can regard humans as having “landed” on this planet and as having found it “to be perfect for us in every way.” Gratitude is an appropriate response to this fact, Goodenough states (368). Evolution “tells us of the sacredness of life, of the astonishing complexity of cells and organisms” (368). To this we can respond with reverence, the “emotion elicited when we perceive the sacred” (368). We can, in fact, regard the mere existence of “complexity and awareness and intent and beauty” as “the ultimate meaning and the ultimate value,” according to Goodenough (369). And because evolution is about “the continuation of genomes,” we need “no other purpose than that the continuation continue until the sun collapses” (369). We do not need to base meaning on a creator, Goodenough says. There is no “superordinate meaning of meaning” (369). Gratitude, reverence, and commitment to continuation, when directed toward the fittingness and sacredness of human life, then, are, according to Goodenough, what give our lives meaning.2 These emotions are atelic – they are not goal aimed, and there is no more to do with them than simply to have them, except perhaps to express them to someone in some way. But even without this expression, they are end of the line, intrinsic goods. In this way, Goodenough’s emotions of gratitude and reverence can stand alone, whereas emotions accompany the pursuit of goals and creativity in the first two ways of acquiring meaning. Goodenough’s emotion of gratitude also differs from gratitude that is directed toward a specific person. In the latter case, the emotion typically contains a desire to express the gratitude to the specific person. It

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seems out of place, however, to say that an emotion of gratitude that is directed toward evolution or the fittingness of life contains a desire to express the gratitude toward evolution or the fittingness of life. In any case, if we combine Goodenough’s focus on gratitude and reverence with Setiya’s recommendation to add the atelic to the telic, we get the assertion that having emotions of gratitude and reverence is another way of acquiring meaning. Although Goodenough mentions only gratitude and reverence, there are many other emotions and their expressions that can be included in this virtues and emotions conception of meaning. Awe, which is akin to reverence, is one. Joy is another. Respect for the intrinsic value of others is still another, along with gratitude that is directed toward specific persons and what they have done to benefit us. These emotions can play a role in telic activities as well, as when respect is involved in goal-aiming activities involving other people or when expressions of gratitude are used to maintain friendships. There are, in fact, a number of virtues and emotions that seem primarily to involve goals, such as patience and kindness. These are usually aimed at producing well-being in others – cooperation, restoration of an ill, or simply good feelings. Moreover, because both intrinsically and instrumentally valuable virtues are nearly always accompanied by emotions, there are numerous emotions that this virtue conception of meaning includes. Cultivating these emotions is a way of having a worthwhile life. It is sometimes said that the best way to enhance the meaningfulness of one’s life is to transcend oneself. One way to do this is to focus, from time to time, on meeting the needs of other people, instead of focusing exclusively on meeting one’s own needs. The virtues-and-emotions way of acquiring meaning fits this thought well, as a number of virtues and emotions are other directed, including some of those mentioned in the last paragraph. The idea is not that self-directed virtues, such as caring for oneself, do not confer meaning, but that one’s life would be much less meaningful if the only virtues one exemplified were self-directed. A believer in the Divine One will say that one’s life is meaningful if one transcends oneself by directing some atelic virtues and emotions toward the Divine One, including gratitude and reverence. Mirroring statements (1)–(3) in Chapter 1, a believer in the Divine One can say that the Divine One implanted in humans the desire and the capacity to exemplify virtues and emotions that transcend oneself, including those directed toward the Divine One; that the Divine One desires for humans to satisfy this desire; and that satisfying this desire is intrinsically good. Here, then, is a third

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way of having a meaningful life, a way that fits into a theistic framework and that is compatible with the first two ways. It is worth pointing out that a virtues conception of meaning has a long history. Although Aristotle never used the word “meaning,” he did say that a well-lived life was one in which certain virtues were exemplified. In the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas Christianized Aristotle’s virtue ethics, and a number of recent philosophers have adopted it after a twocentury hiatus in which Immanuel Kant’s deontological ethics and John Stuart Mill’s utilitarianism dominated ethical theory. The virtues-andemotions way of acquiring meaning is based loosely on the virtue ethics tradition in philosophy.

love given and received Brooke Alan Trisel, whom I quoted previously as adopting a goal way of acquiring meaning, states that goal-directed activity is not the only way to acquire meaning: “There are other commendable aspects of life, such as aesthetic appreciation and being with family and friends, which may have little or nothing to do with goal-directed activity” (Trisel 2013: 433). Susan Wolf, too, states that there is more to meaning than goal-aiming projects when she points out that using the word “projects” to describe what gives meaning to life is a little misleading, as a number of non-goal-aiming activities give meaning to life, including “ongoing relationships and involvements – with friends, family, the scientific community, with church or ballet or chess” (Wolf 1997: 211–12). The central idea in this way of acquiring meaning is encapsulated by Martin Buber in his I and Thou: “All real living is meeting” (Buber 1958: 11) – all real living involves encountering other humans and connecting to them as humans. The basic idea is that the love given and received within families and between friends, acquaintances, and strangers is intrinsically good. And having this intrinsic good in one’s life gives it meaning. Richard Rolle, author of The Fire of Love, would concur: “To love and be loved is the delightful purpose of all human life” (Rolle 1972: 121). Although this fourth way of acquiring meaning technically belongs in the third category, it has sometimes been neglected by theoreticians of meaning in favor of achieving goals. In addition, it has several attractive features that make it worth treating separately. The first is that many everyday people, that is, nontheoreticians of meaning, regard love as supremely valuable, perhaps even the most important ingredient in living

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meaningfully. If we were to do a survey of what people value most, we could imagine a large percentage of them answering something akin to “personal relationships” or “my friendships.” Terry Eagleton writes, “For most people, in practice if not always in theory, life is made meaningful by their relationships with those closest to them, such as partners and children” (Eagleton 2007: 88).3 A second attractive feature is that love given and received can fill an emptiness many people would feel if they did not have love or friendship in their lives. The feeling of emptiness is the feeling that nothing is worthwhile, that “I don’t know what my life is about” and that “I need something to feel contented.” Love given and received often diminishes or eradicates this agonizing and tormenting feeling, and it is sometimes the only thing that does so, as we shall see in the next chapter on suicide. A third attractive feature of this way of acquiring meaning is that it involves Setiya’s atelic states and activities. Although being with family and friends is often conjoined with creative goal-directed activities, simply being with family and friends is not goal directed. Nor are many of the emotions or expressions of virtues that one has when being present with family and friends. For all these reasons, love is deserving of being singled out. The connection of emotions to this way of acquiring meaning is especially tight. It is hard to imagine an emotionless creature, with no discernible facial expressions of emotion, finding its mere presence with others meaningful. It is hard to imagine such a creature even having friends. The same is true to an extent of emotional hermits. Virtues and emotions, both moral and nonmoral, are a significant part of what makes presence with others worthwhile. Lawrence Blum argues for this in his “Friendship as a Moral Phenomenon”: “The moral excellence of friendship involves a high level of development and expression of the altruistic emotions of sympathy, concern, and care,” plus trust and intimacy (Blum 1980: 70, 69). To these we can add the deep contentment of being cared about and understood, enjoyment when sharing activities, and delight when planning projects together. Both the altruistic emotions Blum lists and the nonaltruistic emotions involved in friendship make friendship worthwhile. This fourth way of acquiring meaning is particularly attractive to certain feminists. Virginia Held and Annette Baier, in differentiating an ethics of care from traditional Western ethical theories, state that family life is an important arena for living a moral life. The Western ethical theories they have in mind focus on the “independent, autonomous, rational individual.” These theories “largely overlook the reality of

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human dependence” (Held 2006: 10). Family life, however, involves dependence, concreteness, and emotions. “We are born into families,” Baier reminds us, which means, she says, that moral development is as much a matter of emotions as it is of reason (Baier 1994: 30). And it also means, Held says, that “the central focus of an ethics of care is on the compelling moral salience of attending to and meeting the needs of the particular others for whom we take responsibility. Caring for one’s child, for instance, may well and defensibly be at the forefront of a person’s moral concern” (Held 2006: 10). The emotions that need to be cultivated in such a context, Held notes, are “sympathy, empathy, sensitivity, and responsiveness” (10). Held and Baier may have the same objections to the goal way of acquiring meaning that they have to traditional Western ethical theories. Held declares that morality is primarily about the “well-being of the caring relation” (12). In fact, she declares, “Care is probably the most deeply fundamental value” (17). Baier criticizes Lawrence Kohlberg’s theory of moral development in which people are said to proceed from pleasing others as children to following moral principles of a Kantian sort as adults – autonomy and respect for the rights of others as equals. She adopts Carol Gilligan’s critique of Kohlberg’s theory, according to which females develop moral maturity by means of interdependence, attachment, and relationships that include care (Baier 1994: 22). The essence of goal-aiming activities, however, involves planning, reasoning, and efficient execution of plans. Although interdependence, attachment, and relationships may be present with planning, reasoning, and execution of plans, they are incidental to goal-aiming activities. So Held and Baier could well say of them that they do not represent what is most important about the moral life, and thus do not represent what is most important for a meaningful life. At the same time, they could also say that for goalaiming activities to be most meaningful, they need to be motivated by care. Although there can be care without goal-aiming activities, as when care is expressed in atelic activity, goal-aiming activities without care would be much less meaningful than with care. This strikes me as true. And it also strikes me as true, with Held and Baier, that care is a supremely important virtue, one that contributes significantly to a meaningful life. This fact, however, does not mean that care is always an overriding virtue, that is, a virtue that always takes precedence in every situation. Oppression, adversity, and domination may require the withholding of sensitivity and care and the adoption of anger at injustice and courage to struggle against oppression. If this is so, then meaning in those conditions

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would be derived more from that anger and courage than from care (see Tessman 2005: 159–68). Also, some people, especially women, may be expected to care so much that they neglect self-development. For such people, self-assertion would be more meaningful than care (see Andolsen 1981). Moreover, the conception of a meaningful life in the feminist ethics of care needs to extend its focus on family and friends to those beyond family and friends. This extension is a prominent part of the Abrahamic religions of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, as represented by this statement from Leviticus 19:34 – “The foreigner who lives among you must be treated like one of your own. Love them as you love yourself, for you too were a foreigner in the land of Egypt” (The Inclusive Bible 2007). Although much has been said about giving love, much less has been said about receiving love. It, too, should be regarded as a significant virtue. Accepting another’s love, including that of the Divine One, is an important component of living meaningfully. This is so partly because of the effects being loved has on a person and partly because it is sometimes difficult to accept another’s love. One significant effect of knowing that one is loved is that one feels valued. Without this sense, it is hard to believe that anything one does is valuable, and without believing this, one can lose motivation for doing much of anything. One wants to give up if one feels totally unloved. Another significant effect of knowing that one is loved is that the contentment that this love produces helps undo anxiety, worry, and despair – one feels that things are okay. It also helps one bear unavoidable hardship, such as a disability. The hardship is not eliminated, but it is easier to live with. Too often it is presumed that accepting another’s love is easy. This is not so. Accepting another’s love is often the hardest thing one can do. One may feel unlovable or feel that one has to prove that they are good before accepting another’s love. One might have had unloving or abusive parents or simply feel self-sufficient and not in need of another’s love. Accepting love needs to be worked on as much as giving love needs to be worked on. This fourth way of acquiring meaning is compatible with believing in the Divine One – a believer in the Divine One can say that the Divine One created humans with the desire and capacity to give and receive love, that the Divine One desires that humans give and receive love, and that giving and receiving love are both instrumentally and intrinsically good. Given that the first three ways of acquiring meaning are also compatible with believing in the Divine One, we can now embrace a robust conception of human nature, a nature containing desires to achieve goals, be creative,

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acquire virtues and emotions, and give and receive love, and a nature that was created by the Divine One so that creatures who possess it could conceive of their existence as having meaning. With this, we now have a religiously motivated conception of acquiring meaning. Having meaning for the believer in the Divine One typically involves believing that meaning is derived from satisfying the desire of the Divine One that humans pursue intrinsic goods and right pleasures through some combination of the four ways described in this chapter. Naturalists need not object to the compatibility of these four ways of acquiring meaning with belief in the Divine One. They can, however, turn the compatibility against the believer in the Divine One by saying that belief in the Divine One is irrelevant to the four ways of acquiring meaning. To this, the best response is that belief in the Divine One is not just compatible with the four ways of acquiring meaning, but enhances them as well. I shall defend this response in Chapters 6 and 7.

other ways of acquiring meaning The four ways of acquiring meaning are ones that are commonly mentioned by philosophers, especially the first. However, when one asks nonphilosophers what the meaning of their lives is, one sometimes gets answers that do not fit easily into any of the four categories. Here are several answers in response to my question, “What keeps you alive now?” asked of formerly suicidal people. “Rachel” likes surprises: “What I love best in life, and what keeps me alive now, is surprises – the good kind, like when you unexpectedly run into a friend you haven’t seen for a long time or when you first hear about a movie you know you’re going to want to see” (Williams 2017: 171). Kathleen mentioned various activities she likes: “I like talking to my Internet friend, discussing philosophy and other topics that most people don’t find interesting. I also like to research various topics” (173). And, in perhaps the most fascinating answer to my question, Torrey listed several dozen things that keep him alive: “What keeps me alive now is music, passion, food, flowers, birds at dusk, the sun at dawn, frost on the hills, the glaze of the trees, wet autumn mornings, the sky at night, the aura so green from the hills in Ireland, the sound of traffic, the buzz of people, the smell of my coffee, the chilies from my garden, all the fruit and vegetables that grow and blossom, eggs and bacon, a fresh pint of Guinness, the smile of a woman, gentle kindness, opening doors for strangers, the sounds of Jimi Hendrix, the sweet hum of Neil Young, the air in misty evenings, light sleet that glows the roads, stop motion

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animation, tenor alto choirs, the fiddle with harp, the sound of my Vespa scooter, the bark of a dog, capturing a photo forever in a day, short poems, folklore tales, the smell of marijuana in the late night garden, sitting beside a fire, complete utter desire – everything keeps me alive!” (171). Instead of trying to fit these answers into one of the four ways of acquiring meaning, I want to make some observations. 1. Torrey’s list is a good reminder that nonmoral goods are often prominent in a worthwhile life, including appreciation of beauty and delighting in good-tasting food. When virtues are mentioned, one almost instinctively thinks of moral virtues. But it is also virtuous to enjoy birds at dusk and misty evenings. These, in fact, sometimes seem to be more significant than moral virtues. “Oh, yes,” one might think, “we should be kind, gracious, just, and empathetic, but what about enjoying warm smiles, sweet fruits, pleasing sounds, flying birds, and starry skies? These are what surround me most of the time. Shouldn’t they be a big part of what makes for meaning?” Yes, Torrey’s answer tells us. Meaning is found in both the moral and the nonmoral. We need to beware of an overmoralized conception of meaning. 2. Sometimes we think of meaning as something that is grand and majestic. It is, indeed, grand and majestic when we adopt the perspective of eternity or the perspective of a divine creator. But meaning is also quotidian, manifesting itself in specific, everyday activities and emotions. If it didn’t manifest itself in these, one could legitimately wonder what the point of meaning is. Grand visions are worked out in details. 3. One of the four ways of acquiring meaning may be more important for some people than for others. Or it may be more important at some times than at others. We do not need to suppose that everyone must exemplify all the four ways of acquiring meaning to the same degree. One person can focus on loving and being loved, and another on creatively achieving goals. Both of their lives would be meaningful. One reason for this third observation is that people vary in their abilities. Some plan and execute projects easily, some are more creative than others, and some find themselves able to connect better to other people in loving ways. Another reason is that some people are hampered in pursuing one or more of the four ways of acquiring meaning by social forces or other constraining circumstances. They gravitate toward the ways that do not hamper them and specialize in specific meaning-ways, as it were. 4. At the same time, it also seems true that for a maximally meaningful life, all four ways of acquiring meaning need to be exemplified at some

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time or other. This thought seems to conflict with the previous one. Perhaps the way to reconcile the two is to say that a maximally meaningful life can legitimately focus on one way of acquiring meaning so long as the others are also exemplified to some degree at some time or other. In support of this observation, I offer the Elimination Test. Imagine someone who is without one of the ways of acquiring meaning. Without pursuing goals at least somewhat successfully, one’s life would lack something worthwhile. Without being creative at least minimally, one’s life would again lack something worthwhile. The same is true of the third and fourth ways. Being without one of the ways of acquiring meaning, then, would make one’s life less meaningful, though not meaningless. I also offer the Ability Claim: everyone possesses at least a minimal ability to pursue each of the ways. Native abilities vary, to be sure, and so do constraining circumstances. But native ability for pursuing each of the four ways is never zero, and constraining circumstances never undo ability completely, though they may do so to a high degree. Last, I offer the Desire Claim: everyone desires to achieve goals, be creative, possess certain virtues and emotions, and give and receive love. These desires vary from person to person and from time to time, and some people may not be fully aware of their desires, but it is hard to imagine anyone without ever having a desire for each of the four ways.4 5. We need not accept as meaningful everything a person says is meaningful to them, or, more poignantly, everything we ourselves think is meaningful. If there is objective morality, then it is likely that some of what a person thinks gives their life meaning does not give it meaning, or does not to the degree they think it does. And if there is a divine creator who can rightly discern what counts as meaningful, then there is someone who knows what parts of our lives are meaningful and what parts are not. For most people, discerning what is meaningful may be the most vexing thing about the meaning of life, not the highly theoretical issues that those of us who are philosophers talk about. 6. The contemplative and mystical strands of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism do not fit well into any of the four ways of acquiring meaning, at least when they are conceived to involve overt activity. Quiet contemplation and mystical experiences of the Divine One are both atelic, and both are said by their advocates to be the “highest” experience possible, by which is meant that they are the most meaningful. Contemplation of the Divine One is regarded by Aquinas as the “ultimate perfection” of humans’ “rational nature” and the fulfillment of humans’ natural desire (see Aquinas 1947: 305 [Summa Theologica I, Q 62, A 1]). Contemplation

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is not a goal as normally conceived. Nor is it an emotion or love, though “beatitude,” or happiness, is said by Aquinas to be involved in contemplation. Mystical experiences are said by mystics not to be “rational,” unlike the rationally tinged four ways of acquiring meaning and also unlike Aquinas’s contemplation. This difference from the four ways would not bother mystics, as they regard the rational mindset of Western thinkers to be too constricting. The issues concerning contemplation and nonrationality are too extensive to discuss here, but one should, I believe, be open to other ways of thinking about meaning than the four ways discussed in this chapter. 7. We need to beware of social, gender, racial, academic, and even meaning elitism. Although objective morality allows for a distinction between more and less meaning, it also requires impartiality. Torrey’s appreciation of mist on the hills and wet autumn mornings should not be ranked less by those who love to read books about “more important” things. Specific male proclivities should not be used to devalue women’s proclivities, as often happens in patriarchal cultures and among male philosophers and theologians. And goal-oriented persons should not look down on those who are less goal oriented, as tends to happen with those who are driven to accomplish things. It is sometimes difficult to keep in mind the need to avoid pernicious elitism. This shows that determining what is truly meaningful sometimes requires a good deal of discernment regarding one’s latent biases. This fact, though, should not undermine the further fact that knowing what is meaningful and what is not is often easy and obvious. It is, after all, clearly true that love is better than hate, and that gratitude, fidelity, empathy, tolerance, and respect for all regardless of race, gender, or academic status are important virtues.

what keeps me alive now? First, a story. Three decades ago it occurred to me that I could ask students what they liked most about living, which I thought was tantamount to asking them what they thought the meaning of their life was. I was excited about asking the question because it struck me that doing so would make conversations more cosmic. So I started right away. I didn’t ask the question out of the blue, but worked my way up to it: How is your semester? What do you like about being in college? What do you like most about living? I had not asked more than two or three students before it occurred to me that if I kept it up some student would ask me the

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question in return. And I had no idea how to answer. So I stopped asking. I thought about the question for an entire year before I decided that I could respond to it if asked. And the very next person I talked to asked me the question. I gave my prepared answer. I don’t remember what it was, though I do know that afterward I decided to set it aside. If I were to expect students to respond to a surprise cosmic question, then I should put myself into the same position. That has resulted in my having to think all over again for a moment when I am asked the question. And it has resulted in my giving somewhat different answers each time. What keeps me alive now is all of the four ways of acquiring meaning, in varying proportions, including numerous quotidian nonmoral goods. My list is as long as Torrey’s, though in conversations I mention only a few of the more prominent ones. Right now they include reading The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, dreaming of hiking in the Colorado mountains again next summer, talking to students, and thinking about meaning.

5 Suicide

a story When “Penny” was five or six, she was sexually abused by a long-term babysitter. “He came into my bedroom to put me to sleep,” she recounts, “and he molested me many times. I kept it secret because I was afraid I had done something wrong and would get into trouble for it. I was also afraid he would get into trouble for it, which I didn’t want to happen, either. Even though what he was doing was so painful that I knew no one could possibly have slept through it, I held in the screams and poured all my willpower into being still.” When Penny became a teenager, the memories of what had happened started bubbling up. She went to a therapist, but found the work she had to go through very difficult. “Everything was getting darker and more painful the more I opened up all the deep feelings and thoughts I had.” She started to lose hope. “It felt as if I was locked in the dark and could not find my way out.” About this time, Penny’s father took an administrative job in the church Penny and her family attended. “He sat the whole family down and talked to us about how he would lose his job if he wasn’t seen to be a father in good standing. So we had to make sure never to misbehave in any way.” Penny felt this pressure strongly. Penny’s father was harsh with her. Whenever she did something wrong – or when her father thought she had done something wrong – he responded with anger and sometimes violence, hitting her on several occasions. Sometimes she tried to explain herself, but that was hard to do because she never knew what she had done wrong or how to avoid the next screaming episode. 79

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“Once my dad backed me up into a wall and pinned me there. He leaned over me, his face inches from mine, and screamed about what a horrible, stupid, worthless thing I was. Spittle flew into my face, but I didn’t flinch. I didn’t cry. I would have been in more trouble if I had done those things.” “The worst of it wasn’t the hitting,” Penny stated. “It was the emotions my father provoked. I was so afraid of making him angry that I tried everything I could think of to placate him. But there wasn’t anything I could do, because no matter how I acted, he always found something to be angry about.” Throughout high school, Penny thought about how she could die. She decided to hurt herself through not eating. “That was my slow suicide,” she said. Gradually Penny got herself down to eighty-five pounds. Penny’s therapist played a large part in saving her: “She was the one person whom I felt I could talk to, and she loved me unconditionally. Even though she knew all of my deepest, darkest secrets, the things I hated myself for, she loved me. Her love was so refreshing to me that I couldn’t get enough of it. Her willingness to nurture me, to be my therapist and my friend, and her caring, saved me.” Also, Penny said, “She taught me what was true and what was false. She taught me that the sexual abuse was completely not my fault, was completely out of my control, that I bore no responsibility and no guilt for it. That took me a very long time to believe. But when I finally got hold of it, it changed how I felt about myself.” Going to college was a big turning point for Penny, because she finally got out of the oppressive environment in her house: “Everything was new and everything was hopeful. I could breathe, I could speak without fear, I could live and choose things without being afraid of how it would be received. So I started to eat again.” The biggest healing came from Penny’s future husband. “When we started dating,” Penny said, “I couldn’t hurt myself anymore, because I could see how much it would hurt him. I couldn’t do that to him. That was the end of my anorexia. I gained weight and haven’t been in danger since.”1

does finding meaning prevent people from killing themselves? This is the question of the chapter. The very first thing to say about it is that it might seem obvious that people would cease being suicidal once

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they found something worth living for. It might, in fact, seem as though there is a conceptual connection between the two – finding something worth living for and wanting to keep living, such that if one possesses the first, one automatically possesses the second. If there were this conceptual connection between the two, it would be true by definition that if a suicidal person found something worth living for, they would want to keep living to a degree that would prevent them from killing themselves. Penny’s experience seems to corroborate this connection. She found something worth living for. That created the desire to keep living, which in turn overcame her suicidal impulses. The transitions in this description seem automatic, if not conceptually, at least psychologically. However, the inner workings of suicidal people are complex. There are sometimes painful memories from childhood, as was the case with Penny. Other times there is overwhelming stress that one can see no way to relieve except by dying. There is often low self-esteem, sometimes self-hate. And usually a strong sense of hopelessness accompanies these. The emotional pain from each of these is nearly always intense. When it is sufficiently intense, having something worth living for does not diminish the emotional pain enough to prevent suicide. What is needed to prevent suicide, then, is that the satisfaction and value of finding something worth living for decrease the emotional pain that is causing one to be suicidal so that the former outweighs the latter. There is good reason to think that this condition was operative in Penny’s experience. The emotional pain she experienced as a result of her childhood abuse and of the severe criticism by her father decreased because of the high level of satisfaction and value that she placed on the love of her therapist, which gave meaning to her life. This satisfaction and value was directly relevant to her emotional pain, and it was strong enough to outweigh that pain. However, not all ways of acquiring meaning decrease the emotional pain of a suicidal person. Some of the ways of acquiring meaning that are extant in the literature of meaning, including most of the four described in the last chapter, probably would have had little effect on Penny’s emotional pain. More specifically, some conceptions of meaning are not directly relevant to the emotional pain experienced by most suicidal people, nor are they usually held with enough strength to overcome the intensity of emotional pain experienced by suicidal people. The love Penny discovered and reveled in was directly relevant to her extreme pain, a pain that came from her childhood abuse and the

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emotionally harmful experiences she had with her father. The relevance of her reveling in the love of her therapist to her emotional pain, and the strength of that reveling, created a desire to keep living that outweighed her suicidal proclivity. To the question of this chapter my answer is, “It depends on the way of acquiring meaning. And it depends on the kind of emotional pain a suicidal person is experiencing.” These two statements are what I shall explicate in what follows. I shall not consider whether the ways of acquiring meaning I discuss are true or correct. My concern is pragmatic, namely, whether these ways of acquiring meaning, when adopted by suicidal people, can prevent them from killing themselves. In different words, I shall be looking at the power these ways of acquiring meaning have to minimize strong suicidal impulses. Philosophers of meaning have rarely considered this power. They have, in fact, rarely mentioned suicide in connection with their discussions of meaning. One exception is Albert Camus, who set his discussion of meaning in the context of “the one truly serious philosophical question,” namely, suicide (Camus 1983: 3). Camus, however, did not treat the question whether the myth of Sisyphus, around which he weaves his ideas on meaning, fits actual suicidal persons’ experiences. Nor did he ask whether the “solution” that he imagines Sisyphus adopting in response to his punishment by the gods would prevent suicidal people from killing themselves. My aim is to remedy these defects in Camus’s treatment of meaning, and more generally to connect questions about the meaning of life to the experiences of suicidal persons. I have never been suicidal, but I have talked with nearly fifty people who attempted suicide for my Choosing to Live: Stories of Those Who Stepped Away from Suicide (Williams 2017). The people I interviewed told me about the severe emotional pain that preceded their attempts to kill themselves plus the brutally raw details of the attempts. So when I refer to suicidal people in what follows, I am not basing what I say on the few stories I tell in this chapter, but on numerous life stories of people who were severely suicidal.

intense emotional pain To illuminate the question of this chapter, does finding a meaning for life save people from killing themselves?, I shall tell another story, one told to me by a student whose cousin was the fellow soldier at the end of the story.

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In an American engagement with the Vietcong during the Vietnam War in the 1960s and early 1970s, an American soldier became trapped under a tractor in a barn when an explosive shell launched by a Vietcong mortar hit the barn. The blow of the tractor’s falling onto the solder no doubt was excruciatingly painful, but not nearly as painful as knowing that he would soon be burned to death, for the soldier was surrounded by flames rapidly advancing toward him from the burning hay on which he lay. He was unable to move and unable to be rescued. The soldier screamed, in terrible and agonizing dread, to a fellow soldier to shoot him. Situations like this are used when discussing euthanasia, but I want to use it to display the psychology of suicide. Two features of the soldier’s pain stand out. It was urgent. The soldier wanted to be shot immediately, without delay and without discussion. The pain was also blinding. It prevented the soldier from seeing any other options besides immediate death. The result of the pain’s urgency and blindingness was a desire to die instantaneously. If the soldier could have shot himself, he would have done so. All suicidal people have emotional pain, but not all have intense emotional pain. Those who do have intense emotional pain experience extreme urgency. They want relief from their pain immediately, without delay and without discussion. They go to the medicine cabinet, not thinking of options for their life, and swallow as many pills as they can. Or they find a parent’s gun and shoot themselves, again not considering how their lives could be different. Such people are blinded by their pain. They cannot countenance the thought that things can get better, a thought that has saved numerous suicidal people from attempting suicide. They cannot think about courses of action that would improve their situation or assuage their pain. Nor can they embrace a sense of meaning that would undo their pain. That pain is too urgent, and it blocks out any alternative except immediate, self-inflicted death. That there is urgency and blindingness with intense emotional pain is reinforced by a study in which it was found that nearly half (48 percent) of those who attempted suicide reported that the time “between the first current thought of suicide and the actual attempt had lasted ten minutes or less” (Deisenhammer 2008: 19–24). Ten minutes is usually not enough time to think of how one’s life could be different or for emotional pain to subside. There are degrees of emotional pain, of course. A lower degree of emotional pain does not have the urgency or blindingness that a higher degree of emotional pain has. So it is not as likely to prevent one from

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thinking about how one’s life could be different. When emotional pain does prevent one from such thinking, what must be found for a suicidal impulse to be reversed is a conception of meaning that is both relevant to the pain and held strongly enough to decrease the pain. It is important to say that depression and suicidal impulses sometimes, perhaps often, have a biological base in the form of altered brain chemistry. When this is so, medication can help one find a conception of meaning that makes living worthwhile. It is not just finding something to live for that decreases the pain, but it is also not just the medication that decreases emotional pain. The medication and the cognitive and emotional effort in finding meaning work together. What follows is a survey of the four ways of acquiring meaning described in Chapter 4 with a view to seeing which ones could help prevent a suicidal person from killing themselves, given that sometimes medical intervention is also needed.

achieving a goal In this way of acquiring meaning, the important feature in the myth of Sisyphus is that nothing Sisyphus did in the underworld accomplished anything. The rock he continually rolled up the hill always rolled back down, causing Sisyphus immense frustration. Now let us ask, What would suicidal people feel if they were not able, like Sisyphus, to achieve any goals? Clearly, the answer is that they would feel the same thing that Sisyphus felt: frustration at not being able to accomplish anything and a profound sense of the pointlessness of everything they did. They would feel that their lives ultimately did not amount to anything because they could get nothing done. They would thus feel a strong sense of hopelessness because of their inability to be successful at what they did. And, no doubt, this inability would also make them feel that they had little worth, perhaps even no worth. Not only are their pursuits failures, but they are failures, they would feel. It is hard for anyone to keep going with this complex mass of emotional pains – constant frustration and feelings of pointlessness, hopelessness, and worthlessness. It is so hard for some people that they want to die. Some of these suicidal people are like the soldier who was trapped under a tractor in the Vietnam War surrounded by approaching flames. What could save such a person? Advocates of this way of acquiring meaning would need to say two things to maintain that successfully achieving goals could save such a person: achieving goals is relevant to the emotional pain of the suicidal

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person, and achieving goals has enough strength to reduce the urgency and blindingness of the suicidal person’s emotional pain. If these are the case, there would usually be a fairly straightforward connection between discovering meaning and ceasing to be suicidal. For some persons, however, achieving a goal might not have enough strength, for it might not be thought to have enough of the “positive value” that Susan Wolf says needs to characterize the projects one engages in for one to have a meaningful life (Wolf 2013: 308). The suicidal person must regard their projects as having positive value. And this regard must have enough strength to outweigh, psychologically, the urgency and blindingness of the frustration and feelings of pointlessness, hopelessness, and worthlessness that the suicidal person has. It is easy to imagine a case in which successfully achieving a goal would not be regarded by a suicidal person as having enough positive value to outweigh the emotional pain they feel from failing. Suppose someone constantly fails at the one thing they regard as having a very high positive value. What they feel they need is to succeed at that one thing, which so far has not happened. So even though they were to succeed at other projects, that would not be likely to save them. It is also easy to imagine what could save a suicidal person if they had failed in a project for which they had very high positive regard. They could spread their regard for positive value around, that is, regard other projects as having a high degree of positive value in addition to the one thing that hitherto has captivated them. In doing so, failure in their one, highly regarded project would be less likely to jeopardize the person’s emotional state so much that they feel suicidal. The other projects for which they have high positive regard would mitigate to some degree the urgency and blindingness of the emotional pain that would ensue from failing at the one project. What about a case, such as Penny’s, in which the source of one’s emotional pain is not failure to be successful in one’s projects? Could achieving success in one’s projects be enough to save such a person from suicide? The answer to this question needs to consider the relevancy requirement, which calls attention to the fact that unless a way of acquiring meaning is relevant to a suicidal person’s emotional pain, there is little psychological likelihood that one’s acquiring meaning decreases one’s emotional pain. In Penny’s case, there is some doubt whether successfully achieving goals would have saved her from trying to starve herself to death. The burning fire in her life’s circumstances did not have to do with failure to achieve certain goals. What turned out to be relevant to

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the kind of emotional pain she was experiencing came from her experiences of unconditional love from her therapist. We can, however, imagine Penny changing in such a way as to regard the goals she had been achieving as having a much higher positive value. Perhaps she could have regarded her school life as having very high positive value so that her numerous academic successes gave her great satisfaction, perhaps enough to set aside, or mitigate, the emotional pain that threatened to kill her. The psychology of suicidal people is so complex that it is difficult to say whether this change in Penny would have saved her. I am inclined to say, in conformity with what most therapists probably would say, that the emotional pain Penny experienced would not have altered much, even though this strategy may have saved her from suicide for a time. It would be as if the fellow soldier were to yell to the trapped soldier, “Think of all the good things you have had in your life.” No doubt recalling to mind the good things in the soldier’s life would have been a great good, one that could have inspired the trapped soldier to die in peace. But it would not have put out the fire or raised the tractor. In like manner, the emotional fire that afflicted Penny would likely still have burned even if she had diverted her attention to achieving valuable goals. Emotional fires that continue to burn often erupt later into conflagrations. At some point it is psychologically probable that Penny’s emotional pain, though tempered temporarily with successful academic projects, would have burst into an out-of-control blaze. Her acquiring meaning through achieving goals very probably would not have had long-term success in preventing severe suicidal feelings. One could, of course, loosen the idea of achieving a goal so that having certain experiences, such as those Penny had with her therapist, could be adopted as a life goal. But doing this would not fit what writers on the meaning of life typically mean by achieving a goal. Though they are not always clear about it, what they seem typically to mean is a series of activities that involves conceiving, planning, and executing. That is not what Penny did. She found healing in her therapist’s love. There are other suicidal people who have ceased being suicidal through being loved. Alan was one such person. He was treated badly by his parents when he was young, so much so that he left them when he was a teenager. He felt abandoned by them. That caused him to wonder why he kept living when he was in college, when I first knew him, and to want to die thirty years later, when his wife left him. After his wife left him – abandoned again, he felt – he

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cut deep gashes on his arms and on his throat nearly from ear to ear. (It was acutely unsettling for me to see them.) When these didn’t kill him, he planned on drowning himself in a pond in a nearby park. Before he walked to that pond in the dark of the night, though, he experienced deep care from a counselor at a hospital who listened to him. That conversation with a caregiver saved him. He had found something to live for – a meaning, he told me. With Alan, too, it was not achieving a goal that prevented his suicide because failure to achieve a goal was not the source of his emotional pain. He was saved by something much more directly related to his emotional pain. What suicidal people need is to find a meaning that is able to dissolve the urgency and the blindingness of their emotional pain. If that pain is derived from having failed at important goals, then achieving an important goal could help prevent them from killing themselves. As Penny’s and Alan’s stories show, though, not all suicidal people’s emotional pain derives from such failure. These people need to find meaning elsewhere to prevent them from killing themselves.

creativity In the creativity way of acquiring meaning, what makes Sisyphus’s activity meaningless is its repetitiveness, and the remedy for the meaninglessness is to become creative. Someone who thought that they were not able to be creative, perhaps by virtue of being stuck in an uncreative job, would undoubtedly feel what Sisyphus felt – “Another boring day at work. Nothing new to look forward to. The same old thing day after day.” If this got highly distressing, it would not be hard to imagine such a person feeling that life for them lacked meaning, and we could imagine them wondering why they kept living. For them to want to continue living, they would have to find some creative endeavor, such as drawing, woodworking, or writing. The creative endeavor would, of course, have to be thought by the person to have enough positive value to offset their sense of meaninglessness. If that sense ever got to be as acute as the fire surrounding the trapped soldier, the person probably would have to find a new job that involved a level of creativity high enough to cause them to want to keep living. Would finding some creative endeavor have prevented Penny or Alan from killing themselves? The answer is the same as for the goal way of acquiring meaning. Their emotional pain did not come from a lack of

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creativity. So finding a new creative endeavor would have been largely irrelevant to what was making them suicidal. Penny and Alan were saved, by their own accounts, by discovering meaning of a different sort – a certain kind of experience that they found so worthwhile and so directly connected to their emotional pain that it dissolved its urgency and blindingness. The creativity way of acquiring meaning, then, would have the ability to prevent someone from killing themselves if they were mired in uncreative and boring repetitiveness. But it would not generally have this ability if someone’s emotional pain were not derived from boring repetitiveness.

exemplifying virtues and emotions Can acquiring certain virtues and emotions prevent someone from killing themselves? It depends. If someone were suicidal because they were deeply disappointed at not having certain virtues and emotions, then acquiring them would be directly relevant to their emotional pain, and thus would help prevent their suicide. However, it does not seem likely that very many people would be suicidal with such disappointment. It could occur, though, if the disappointment turned into moral or religious despair. In moral despair, one regards oneself as not being “good enough” or not able to control their anger or not able to exemplify certain important virtues. In religious despair, one does not feel able to measure up to the Divine One’s standards of goodness. In both kinds of despair, there could also be the feeling that the one thing that could remedy the despair is impossible to have, namely, to exemplify certain virtues or to measure up to the Divine One’s standards of goodness. In this case, it may be that the only remedy is to experience the kind of love and care that Penny and Alan experienced – from other persons, from the Divine One, even from oneself.

love given and received To the three attractive features of this fourth way of acquiring meaning described in Chapter 4 we can add that this way is much more likely to prevent people from killing themselves because it is much more directly related to the emotional pain many suicidal people experience. It is what kept Penny alive and what saved Alan from killing himself. It is also what keeps other formerly suicidal people alive. Before Ethan tried to kill himself, he felt absolute helplessness, complete isolation, with no one to turn to whom he could trust with his

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feelings. He had a deep and bottomless loneliness. He wanted to run away from everything and wanted everyone to leave him alone. He stopped opening mail, answering the phone, and speaking to people. He felt that he was failing himself and others (Williams 2017: 164). When I asked him what kept him alive, he said, “I make a point of getting out of my house as often as possible, engaging with others, and trying to get energy from them. I try to look people in the eye and smile, and I occasionally greet others with a hug or an embrace. Before my attempt, I had completely stopped doing what clearly were lovely things to do” (170). It is clear that Ethan found meaning in loving and being loved. Prior to his suicide attempt, he had disengaged himself from others almost entirely. After his suicide attempt, he tried fighting for his life, although at first he did not know what he was fighting for or how to fight. He eventually did find out – engage with others, give to them, and receive from them. Anne also found meaning in knowing that she was loved. For two decades prior to her suicide attempt Anne had felt that she had to be something other than what she was to be loved and accepted. She felt shame and “less than,” unaccepted and unloved. She wrestled with these feelings for sixteen years after her suicide attempt as well. Then, at age sixty-one, she came to feel that she could accept herself as she was, not as others wanted her to be. She finally felt she was unreservedly okay. “It feels to me now that my creator has been waiting a long time for me to accept this gift of grace, waiting a long time for me to recognize that I had been living a false life. It feels as if I have been given a new life, one that is fresh and unencumbered. I have received the gift of being nurtured, like the nurturing a newborn child is given. Now, with the grace of being loved, the power my false self had over me for so many years has been nullified. I don’t feel that I have to be someone else in order to be loved. The anxiety of trying to figure out what life is all about, which for a long time has been an albatross for me, has been washed away” (149). Harvey, too, is kept alive now because of love. “I tried to suffocate myself once, but just as I was about to gray out, I had a burst of energy and freed myself, because I knew my dad would be devastated if I died. And I almost slit my throat a few times, but didn’t only because I thought of my dad. I now feel that no matter how much I suffer, no matter how much I hate myself, and no matter how much I want life to end, I will live for those who love me. I could never hurt them with my death” (172). I have quoted Ethan, Anne, and Harvey at length because nearly everyone else I talked to who had attempted suicide gave similar answers, ones that involved love given and received. No one mentioned achieving a goal

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or creativity. A few mentioned something that could fit into the virtues and emotions category. If Sisyphus had been surrounded by loving friends, his frustration and boredom at not being able creatively to build something beautiful with the rocks he rolled up the hill would have been alleviated a good deal. Knowing this, the gods made sure that Sisyphus endured his torture alone, and also made sure that his overriding passion was to make something with the rocks. It is possible, of course, that the source of some suicidal people’s emotional pain is due largely to an inability to fulfill the conditions of one of the first three ways of acquiring meaning – accomplishing a goal, being creative, and possessing positive virtues and emotions. If so, then the love given and received way of acquiring meaning will not be as relevant to the emotional pain of a suicidal person. But even in this case, loving and being loved still could play an important role in a suicidal person’s finding something to live for. It would do so if the suicidal person were to broaden their conception of what has high positive value to include the emotional satisfaction involved in giving and receiving love. It would also do so if the suicidal person were to cultivate connections with people who themselves had a high level of giving and receiving love. I make this last point with full acknowledgment of how hard it is for suicidal people to cultivate such connections. Severe depression often makes it nearly impossible to reach out to others, and many suicidal people do not have people in their lives who have a high level of giving and receiving love.

believing in the divine one Would believing in the Divine One make a difference to each of these four ways of acquiring meaning, that is, help prevent people from killing themselves? The answer is that it might, but also that it might not. Several considerations support the “it might” answer. The first consideration is that believing in the Divine One provides an additional motivation for acquiring meaning in one or more of the four ways, namely, to do what the Divine One desires for humans to do. This additional motivation springs from the answer to the question of Chapter 1 – Why should we care about meaning? – which is that the Divine One has instilled in humans desires for intrinsic goods and that the Divine One desires for humans to satisfy these desires by achieving goals, being creative, exemplifying positive virtues and emotions, and loving and being loved. This additional motivation for pursuing the four ways of

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acquiring meaning may help assuage suicidal thoughts and may provide additional incentive not to attempt suicide. A second consideration is that believing in the Divine One can consist in part of having certain emotions that may mitigate the impulse to kill oneself. One such emotion is freedom from anxiety. Another is a deep contentedness, a “peace that passes understanding.” The component that may have the strongest effect on the emotional pain of being suicidal is the sense of being loved by one’s divine creator. One who feels this love strongly may say, “The meaning of my life consists of believing in the Divine One, who loves me and sustains me through life’s ups and downs.” This thought is part of what now keeps Penny alive, two decades after her suicidal period: “Love keeps me alive. God’s love. And my husband’s love. All my friends care about me. My therapist is still the same woman I had at fifteen, and she still won’t take my money, even though I’m an adult and have a job and am happy to pay her” (Williams 2017: 54). A third consideration for the “it might” answer is the sense of hope that believing in the Divine One can engender. This hope would be based on the belief that the Divine One can be trusted to help make one’s life better or that the Divine One will dry all one’s tears after death. This belief in divinely grounded hope could give meaning to a sufferer: “My life now is full of barely endurable emotional pain, but I will hold out for the sake of the hope I have that the Divine One will make things better later, if not in this life, then in the next. This is what makes life worthwhile for me now.” This hope may help suicidal people to regard their emotional pain as temporary and thus get through attacks of emotional pain until life gets better for them. Randy, who attempted suicide several times, confessed, “From time to time, the thought of killing myself still pops up. ‘Why is life so difficult? It would be so easy if I were gone.’ But then I think of the old axiom, ‘Suicide is a long-term solution to a temporary problem,’ and when I do, I get hope again and want to keep living” (73). On the “it might not” side, there are two considerations. One is that one’s emotional pain may at times become so extreme and overpowering that it blinds one to everything else but the thought of killing oneself, including one’s belief in the Divine One and its additional motivation for staying alive. The second consideration is that believing in the Divine One is not always directly and specifically relevant to the source and content of the emotional pain that many suicidal people experience. Penny and Alan, interestingly, believed in the Divine One. What they needed, in addition to this belief, was to have specific features of their emotional pain addressed,

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features that directly related to their abuse and abandonment. They also needed a human person to give them love.

necessary but not sufficient I need now to add a qualification to the claim that the ways of acquiring meaning can help prevent a person from killing themselves. It is that usually a suicidal person also needs to have specific beliefs about the source and nature of their emotional pain. Often they are unaware of this or are not sure of it, which makes their emotional pain difficult to deal with. Consider Penny again. She needed to be told, and believe, that the sexual abuse she was a victim of as a child was completely not her fault, was completely out of her control, and that she bore no responsibility for it. To repeat what she said earlier: “That took me a very long time to believe. But when I finally got hold of it, it changed how I felt about myself” (53). So the way of acquiring meaning that was relevant to her emotional pain – the strong sense of being loved – though necessary for her healing and subsequent desire to keep living, was not sufficient for it. The same was true for Mark, who was a student at a Christian seminary, studying to be a minister. He was diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder several months after he fell into a slump brought about by a breakup with his girlfriend and a subsequent loss of most of his friends. He was put on antidepressants and started seeing a therapist once a week. But he felt himself getting worse rather than better. Soon he discovered self-mutilation: “It is hard for me to talk about that, because cutting is such a bizarre thing. I never thought, ‘You know what I can do? I am going to cut open my arteries and that will help me feel better.’ That is insane. Yet I fell into it.” Mark explains what was going on with his cutting: “I think I was trying to distract myself from the emotional pain I was experiencing, just for a moment. But it didn’t work. It just created more pain. That, though, is why I think I kept doing it. I was very angry without knowing it. I was angry at the world. I was angry at God. I was angry at my girlfriend and my friends. I took all that anger and turned it toward myself. I made long, deep gashes on my left arm.” (I winced when I saw them.) He tried to suffocate and strangle himself with a bed sheet while he lay in bed. But he gave that up because he saw that it would not work unless he kept going at it for a long time. Several weeks later he went on a frenzy with pills, which he downed with vodka. But his stomach rebelled, and for many painful hours it emptied itself.

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Mark finally went to a clinic where he participated in individual and group therapy for eight hours a day. Being there, he said, “opened my eyes to the horrible ways I was treating myself. I had been having a lot of selftalk, behind-the-scenes conversations in my head that had brought me down. It also showed me all the anger I had. The people at the clinic gave me resources to work through my anger and grief, and I learned how to face loss.” Mark hung on to his faith in the Divine One during this bleak and agonizing time, and it made a difference to him: “Trying to keep walking with God was a way of taking care of myself.” It is clear, though, that faith did not do all of the work in his eventual recovery. For, first, prior to going to the clinic, he felt that he had lost access to the Divine One: “It seemed as though God’s voice went completely silent after the breakup with my girlfriend and the loss of all my friends. God felt very far away.” And, second, pertinent to the point of this section, there were features of his depression that he needed to know about, such as the lies he let himself believe: “I’m worthless. I’m never going to get out of this. This is what life is going to be like. God must have abandoned me” (117). Though he needed a belief in the Divine One to get out of his slump, he also needed a specific awareness of what he was doing to himself.

what do suicidal people need? I have told Penny’s and Mark’s stories to illustrate the truth that suicidal people usually need both a way of acquiring meaning and specific, individualized beliefs, both something to live for and specific awareness of what is going on inside them. They also need hope for a better life. They usually are so consumed by despair that they cannot picture themselves without emotional pain. They need to be able to picture themselves without that pain. They need to be reassured that their fight to stay alive is worth it. They especially need coping skills and strategies they can use to get through a day. They need something that gets them up in the morning. This last is sometimes so agonizingly laborious for a suicidal person that they want to stay curled up in bed all day. With a trained counselor or psychiatrist, self-understanding can be acquired and coping skills to deal with daily struggles learned. Given these needs, it is helpful for suicidal people to be able to tell the story of their lives – a narrative from their early experiences to their current state and then a projection into the future. Such a narrative gives

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an overall context for their emotional pain – “It started this way, got worse at a certain time, and now is overwhelming. But I can see how I could live in the future without it crippling me.” An overall context can give both understanding and hope. One of the biggest things suicidal people need is a support system – friends, acquaintances, and professionally trained therapists who can listen to them with caring and expert attention as they try to unburden themselves. For someone simply to be present is especially important. In response to my question, “What would you have liked for someone to say to you when you were suicidal?” Penny said, “I was incredibly lonely. I needed people to spend time with me, show they cared about me regularly – call me, come over, invite me out. I felt completely repulsive, unlovable, disgusting. Having people say that they cared about me would have been great; having people show that love in their actions would have been even better, because I had been lied to a lot in my life and trust was a major issue.” Mark said, “What I wanted was for someone simply to be present, to dwell in my depression with me. Everyone wanted to help me, but no one was very knowledgeable about depression. They tried to help with words, but depression is not something that can be reasoned with. Everything you loved and everything you were passionate about is now dead inside you. It’s a place where you need people to be comforting even if they don’t use any words. I think that would have been the most helpful thing for me.” Even animals can play a role in keeping someone alive. Eva said, “I have a lot of pets. There have been a couple of times when my animals have convinced me not to go through with suicide. If someone had brought one of my pets to me when I was suicidal and I had looked at its face, I might have thought, ‘What is this little creature going to do without me?’” Over and over once-suicidal people told me as I listened to their stories that they wanted to be listened to. Aaron declared, “I would have liked for someone to sit and listen without saying anything. I would have liked to feel that I could unload everything in my head onto someone. They would just let me speak. I didn’t have that at the time I was suicidal.” Catherine said, “I wanted to be listened to, and to get all the thoughts that were trapped inside my head out into the air, so that maybe they would leave me alone.” These responses do not fit well into the first three ways of acquiring meaning I have discussed. They are further evidence for the claim that the last way of acquiring meaning often has a better ability to prevent suicide

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than do the first three. They are also further evidence of the importance of the last way of acquiring meaning for nonsuicidal people (without entailing the unimportance of the first three ways), for two reasons: nonsuicidal people have many of the same needs that suicidal people have, and nearly every nonsuicidal person sometimes experiences the same kinds of emotional pain that suicidal people experience, albeit usually to a lesser degree.

the complexity of emotional pain So far I have talked as though a suicidal person’s emotional pain has just one source. It often has more than one source, though, which makes the question of whether finding meaning can prevent suicide more complex. It may be that someone has been hurt badly by their parents and has been unable to find a job. They would feel the sting of rejection by people who mattered to them and the sting of thinking that they are a failure. Or it may be that someone has been dumped by a lover and been criticized for being depressed because of having been dumped, as was the case with Mark. There are many other combinations as well. And often the intensities of the different emotional pains vary so that one of the pains is predominant and the others are less so. I have also been talking as though there is a source of a person’s emotional pain in the sense of a known object, such as a series of hurtful events or a specific condition. Sometimes, though, suicidal people feel a vague and general malaise or despondency with no easily identifiable referent. When this happens, they have no idea where the pain is coming from. It may, indeed, not have a source in the sense of having an object or having had a painful experience, but be a product of bipolar disorder, seasonal affective disorder, or some other biological cause. In addition, there is a distinctive life-has-no-meaning pain that can be experienced by suicidal people. This pain can manifest itself as disappointment, anguish, or despair, perhaps anger and self-hate as well, or all these, revolving around the thought that one’s life has no meaning. Irvin Yalom reports that in a study of forty patients, about 30 percent had issues centering on lack of meaning (Yalom 1980: 448). In some cases, a lack-of-meaning pain arises from other emotional pains – the specter of constantly living with these other pains makes one feel that their life is no longer worth living. In other cases, a lack-of-meaning pain arises independently, as it did for Tolstoy as recounted in his Confessions. When he became suicidal at fifty-one, he did not seem to be afflicted

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with the sorts of emotional pains that many other suicidal people experience. His lack-of-meaning pain was so intense, he writes, that he hid a rope from himself so that he would not be tempted to hang himself (Tolstoy 1983: 28). The questions that haunted him were, “What will come of what I do today and tomorrow? What will come of my entire life?” (34). For a time, Tolstoy remained suicidal because of his inability to find answers to these questions. One important implication of these facts is that Camus’s scenario of the myth of Sisyphus is not representative of the wide array of emotional pains that suicidal people experience. Another is that a life-has-no-meaning pain – anguish or despair – can often be mixed in with the other emotional pains suicidal people experience. These two implications mean that, though love given and received is prominent in preventing suicide, the remedy for suicidal impulses is often complex.

6 The Divine One

To believe in God means to see that life has a meaning. (Wittgenstein 1979: 74) Our scope for doing good or bad becomes much greater if there is a God, and so too therefore does the meaningfulness of our life if we choose the good. (Swinburne 2016: 155)

Believers in the Divine One typically have held that one must believe in the Divine One for one’s life to have meaning. Although some of those who do not believe in the Divine One concur, thereby inferring that life has no meaning, most do not – life can be meaningful, they say, even though one does not believe in the Divine One. I agree with these latter, but also believe that the meaning of life is significantly enhanced by believing in the Divine One. This is the thesis of the chapter. One assumption behind this thesis – the enhancement thesis – is that meaning comes in degrees. This is an assumption most people commonly make – some activities or emotions are more meaningful than others. Having meaning is not all or nothing. Thus, the enhancement thesis allows that people who do not believe in a divine creator can do meaningful things and have meaningful lives, but it asserts that such people could have significantly more meaning if they were to believe in a divine creator. The enhancement thesis differs from the view that those who do not believe in a divine creator have no meaning at all. A second assumption is that morality is objective, or in the language I have been using, there are intrinsic goods. If morality were subjective, 97

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that is, entirely a matter of one’s likes and dislikes, one could not say of two activities that are equally liked that one is more meaningful than the other. The person who mindlessly likes watching television five or six hours a day just as much as one who likes to visit nursing home patients would have an equally meaningful life as the nursing home visitor. It is hard to believe that this is so. The enhancement thesis depends on this ability to rank meaning by criteria other than by the intensity of one’s liking what one does. The criterion I shall employ in arguing for the enhancement thesis is the quantity of rightly valued intrinsic goods. Sometimes, to be sure, people use “meaning” to signify only a subjective state, as in “Sarah obtains a great deal of meaning from her religion,” or “Vjeran Tomic got a lot of meaning from stealing well-known art from French art museums” (Halpern 2019: 30), referring to Sarah’s and Tomic’s passionate involvement in their activities. This is, indeed, a legitimate use of “meaning.” But it is also a legitimate use to say that their meaning was false or ill conceived or a delusion if the religion was mistaken or Tomic’s thefts were wrong. For this reason, a divine creator must exist to say that one’s meaning is enhanced by believing in a divine creator. One would be a victim of delusion otherwise. And delusion is not compatible with having more meaning. The enhancement thesis is not simply that one has more meaning solely as a result of believing in a divine creator. A divine creator must exist. Merely believing in a divine creator is not enough to ensure enhanced meaning for another reason. Believers in a divine creator are afflicted from time to time with one of the causes of indifference described in Chapter 1, such as depression, low moral energy, or suffering. These conditions may cause believers to have a less than ideal life. Moreover, believing in a divine creator often grows in one, sometimes slowly and sometimes with setbacks. It does not automatically produce a meaningful life at all times. A last assumption behind the enhancement thesis of the chapter is that believing in the Divine One consists of a good deal more than simply believing in the existence of the Divine One. It typically consists of a complex of beliefs, desires, and emotions. Among the beliefs are that the Divine One is the maker of the universe; is good and wise; desires humans to pursue intrinsic goods and thereby meaningful lives; loves humans and desires love in return; and deserves reverence. Among the desires are to love and be loved by the Divine One, to pursue meaningful lives as an act of love for the Divine One, and to revere the Divine One. Among the emotions are love for the Divine One, the sense of being loved by the Divine One, trust in the Divine One, and reverence for the Divine

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One. Some of these components may be more pertinent to particular ways in which meaning is enhanced. At one time or for one person, believing in the Divine One may consist of some of the features of a good friendship, including a deep trust and a sense of intimate connection. At other times or for other people, believing in the Divine One may consist of something less intimate, such as Rudolf Otto’s “numinous” experience: “mystery, awefulness, majesty, augustness, and ‘energy’” (Otto 1950: 40). Whatever the focus of one’s believing, at least some of the beliefs, desires, and emotions must be present for there to be enhancement of meaning. At several points in this and the next two chapters the problem of evil arises. This is the problem of how a perfectly good, all-knowing, and allpowerful divine being could allow evil to exist in its creation. There is, unfortunately, not enough space to address the problem in this book. A fuller account of meaning and its connection to a divine creator would, though, need to address it. One way to read this chapter is as a response to the Irrelevancy Objection, which says that belief in the Divine One is irrelevant to meaning – the same things that give the believer meaning also give the nonbeliever meaning. Julian Baggini voices something like this objection in his response to Jesus’s words: “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full” (John 10:10). About this declaration Baggini states, “An atheist can agree with it. Atheists too think that we should live life to the full . . . . In a sense, the sentiment expressed is just a platitude: who could think humans should not have life, and have it to the full?” (Baggini 2004: 17–18). Baggini is suggesting that believing in the Divine One does not add anything to a meaningful life, which an atheist can have as well. The one thing that would make a difference, Baggini says, is the existence of life after death: “If a full life includes life after death, then atheist and religious conceptions do part company” (18). Baggini sets this issue aside until later in his book, and so will I. The question here is simply, What difference does believing in the Divine One make? The answer, I believe, is that there are a number of differences: a different overall context; additional virtues and emotions; satisfaction of the urge, or continuing impulse, to transcend oneself; and a cure for existential boredom. In these ways, believing in the Divine One is relevant to a meaningful life.

context Thomas Morris formulates a version of what can be called the Context Principle: “The appropriateness of a form of behavior is always a function

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of its context” (Morris 1992: 24). It is easy to see the truth of this principle by looking at an action that has a certain significance in one social context and a different significance in another social context. A raised arm with a clenched fist can be a stretching maneuver in a workout class, or it can indicate solidarity at a political rally. The opening of one’s hands, palms up, in front of one’s body, can be an exercise for arthritic hands of an older adult, or it can be an expression of openness between two friends or lovers. The Context Principle applies also to meaningfulness, as stated by Lars Svendsen: “Meaning consists in inserting small parts into a larger, integrated context” (Svendsen 2005: 29). Pursuing meaning is not isolated, but is contained in a framework – a framework of culture, family, and, for the present point, an overall worldview that espouses either naturalism or theism. Morris, a theist, connects the existence of the Divine One to meaning: “The question about the existence of God . . . is not just a question about whether one more thing exists in the inventory of reality. It is a question about the ultimate context for everything else. The theist and the atheist should see everything differently” (Morris 1992: 25). There are, indeed, wide differences between theism and atheism, or naturalism. Without a divine person, the universe would consist, as Bertrand Russell stated, only of “the trampling march of unconscious power” that is “blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction,” and it would be nothing more than “omnipotent matter” rolling “on its relentless way” (Russell 1917: 54). Without a divine person, in the words of the narrator in Albert Camus’s The Plague, the residents in the plague-ridden city of Oran “had to be content to live only for the day, alone under the vast indifference of the sky” (Camus 1948: 68). But with the existence of a divine person, we humans would not be alone and the universe would not be indifferent to us humans. It was said of Ivan Ilyich, in Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, that as he lay dying he found himself in a “solitude in the midst of the populous town and his numerous acquaintances and family – a solitude than which there could be none more total anywhere” (Tolstoy 2009: 48). With the sense of the presence of the Divine One, though, Ivan Ilyich need not have felt utterly alone or that everything was indifferent to his suffering. It would have been possible for him to have felt that there was a cosmic person who was “with” him and that this cosmic person cared for the way he lived and was concerned for his suffering and pain. The idea of a loving creator is central to the context that enhances meaning within a theistic framework. With a loving creator, the fact that humans have the capabilities of creatively aiming at goals, having

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virtues and emotions, and being in loving relationships with other humans and the Divine One is due to the fact that the loving creator endowed humans with these capabilities along with desires for humans to actualize them. The added significance is, first, that humans can have a sense of personal belonging when pursuing the four ways of acquiring meaning, that is, a sense of connection to a cosmic, personal being. In naturalism, with its impersonal and nonconscious universe, pursuing meaning in the four ways is set in a context of cosmic indifference, or even cosmic alienation. There is no sense of cosmic, personal belonging in such a framework. The added significance is, second, that humans can have an additional motivation for pursuing meaning in the four ways in addition to their goodness, namely, to please the Divine One. More strongly, the additional motivation can be love for the Divine One, a love that responds to the love the Divine One has for humans. Pursuing meaning in the four ways can thus be an expression of love for the Divine One. This second source of significance is absent in naturalism because pursuing meaning within a naturalist framework is not an expression of love for a divine creator. Some people who reject the Divine One’s role in securing meaning go beyond Bertrand Russell’s trampling march of unconscious power with its blind indifference to good and evil. Susan Wolf, in her Meaning in Life and Why It Matters, rejects this indifference: “Meaning arises from loving objects worthy of love and engaging with them in a positive way” (Wolf 2010: 8). These objects are worthy, Wolf is saying, not simply because humans like them or feel fulfilled when acquiring them, but because they are objectively valuable. Humans are not entirely alone – there is something more, namely, objective and independent value. For a meaningful life, Wolf says, one should “get involved . . . with something the value of which is independent of and has its source outside of oneself” (19). Part of the point of wanting to assess meaning using objective value, she says, is so that what one does with one’s life is not just for oneself – objective value “takes one out of oneself” (29). This view contrasts markedly with “raw humanism,” the view, as stated by Baggini, that “knowledge and value have no foundations other than those of human thought and practice” (Baggini 2004: 82). Wolf is decidedly not a raw humanist, because she adds objective value to human thought and practice. Because of this objective value, there are degrees of meaningfulness: “If one activity is worthwhile and another is a waste,” Wolf writes, “then one has reason to prefer the former, even if there is no God to look down on us and approve” (Wolf 2010: 105).

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Wolf’s addition of objective value to an otherwise blind and indifferent universe certainly adds meaning that is absent in raw humanism. Objective value satisfies the human need “to think well” of oneself, as Wolf says (28). This could not be done, without illusion or self-deception, if the only way humans could assess value were entirely subjective. It also connects humans to something larger than themselves. This means, Wolf says elsewhere, that our reasons for doing things are not “grounded in our own psychologies, nor specifically in our own desires, but in a fact about the world” (Wolf 2013: 313). This fact is, Wolf states, “that we are, each of us, specks in a vast and value-filled universe, and that as such we have no privileged position as a source of or possessor of objective value” (313–14). Humans can satisfy their desire to transcend themselves by believing in objective values and exemplifying them in their lives. From the perspective of one who believes in the Divine One, however, this meaning can be exceeded a significant amount by believing in the Divine One. The enhancement derives from the fact that the Divine One is a person, one who thinks, desires, and loves. A human person can have the sense that they “fit” better in a universe with a cosmic person than in one without such a person. One can also have a sense of belonging to this cosmic person and be motivated to pursue meaning by love for this person. With just objective values, however, one cannot have the sense of “fitting” in the universe – objective values without a cosmic person who endorses the values is as impersonal as a universe without objective values at all. There is no sense of cosmic belonging in either case, nor is one motivated by love for a cosmic person in either case. Even in a universe with objective values, one would still feel alienated by the vast impersonal cast of the universe. There is, to be sure, more with objective value than without it – one can make objective judgments about meaning – but there is even more for one who believes in a loving creator.

additional virtues and emotions If one believes in a divine creator, one can have a number of intrinsically good virtues and emotions. One such emotion is love for the Divine One. Another is awe of the Divine One. Still another is being loved by the Divine One. Further virtues and emotions include gratitude toward the Divine One for being able to experience intrinsic goods and right pleasures. It is difficult for a naturalist to include gratitude that is directed toward an impersonal universe, though some have tried to do so (see Solomon 2007: 269–70 for such an attempt). Another important virtue is joy that is

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directed toward the Divine One – a bountiful serenity and elation that one is loved by the divine creator of oneself. Naturalists might say that they possess a cosmic, impersonal joy, but believers in the Divine One would regard joy that is derived from one’s being loved by a divine creator as having more value. Other virtues and emotions can be added to these: reverence, a sense of belonging, and a sense of cosmic security, each of which is directed toward the Divine One. Although reverence sometimes contains awe, it also contains the perception that its object is sacred. One might have awe toward the vast panoply of stars visible on a dark night or toward the remarkable fact that objective morality exists, as Immanuel Kant did, but it seems somewhat out of place to have reverence toward them. That is reserved for a creator who is perfectly good and just.1 In addition, one can add to one’s identity the awareness of belonging to the Divine One mentioned earlier, an identity that is somewhat like the awareness of belonging to one’s parents, but in this case an identity that consists of belonging to one’s loving creator. Last, one can have an emotion of cosmic security, in which one believes that in the end things will be okay, come what may. Naturalists can respond by saying that they are fully satisfied with possessing virtues and emotions that are not directed toward anything supernatural. Having these virtues and emotions is sufficient to feel that one’s life is meaningful, and belief in a divine person is not needed for the virtues and emotions to give one a rich and satisfying life. Eric Wielenberg adopts this approach: “If there are activities available to us during our lifetimes that are intrinsically valuable, then our lives can have internal meaning even if God does not exist” (Wielenberg 2013: 348). For a human life to have “internal meaning,” Wielenberg says, is “for it to be good for the person who lives it and for it to include activity that is worthwhile” (336). We engage in numerous such activities, he states, including “falling in love, engaging in intellectually stimulating activity, being creative in various ways, experiencing pleasure of various kinds, and teaching” (348). The key idea here is that having these intrinsic goods is fully sufficient for a person’s life to be meaningful. No “supernatural commander” or “Significant Deity” that cares about us is needed (348). To use the words that I have been using, the idea is that naturalists can employ the concept of degrees of meaning to say that one can enjoy significant meaning in a naturalist framework. It would consist of rightly valued activities, virtues, and emotions. To assess this response, a comparison can be made to tastes. Picture someone who is a supertaster, one who experiences the sense of taste with

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far greater intensity than is normal. I am one, so I can attest to the accuracy of online descriptions. Supertasters find certain foods and drinks bitter, including coffee, brussels sprouts, grapefruit, cilantro, jalapeno, carbonated water, and alcoholic drinks, plus soothing mint toothpaste. The degree of bitterness varies from painful to severely painful, sometimes as though one’s tongue is being stabbed by a handful of pins. Supertasters cannot drink wine or coffee or eat most Mexican or Indian food without extreme reactions. They do, however, enjoy a wide variety of tastes, which they find satisfying. Is their food life as good as that of people who can enjoy Mexican or Indian food? The answer is yes and no. Insofar as supertasters enjoy an array of good-tasting food, as I do, they can say that they have meaningful food experiences, a maximal amount given their capabilities. At the same time, their food life would be much enriched by being able to enjoy the foods that others enjoy. Supertasters cannot, of course, imagine this being so – I certainly cannot – but that is only because of a physiological incapacity due, it is thought, to the higher concentration of taste buds on their tongues. If they did not have that incapacity, they would have a wider array of enjoyable tastes. And this wider array would enhance their food life to a significant degree. In the same way, having virtues and emotions in a naturalist context can give one’s life as much meaning as can be had given that naturalism is true, but having virtues and emotions that are directed toward the Divine One would increase the number of rightly valued intrinsic goods. This increase would not, though, simply be a matter of taste. It would be a moral matter, broadly construed, because the additional intrinsic goods that are involved in one’s relationship to the Divine One are objective. The enhancement of meaning would consist of having these additional objective, intrinsic goods. And because these additional intrinsic goods are very highly valuable, the enhancement of meaning would be highly significant. It would, in fact, be maximal, that is, all the meaning of which a human is capable. So the meaning for one who believes in the Divine One contains a great deal more than the meaning that can be acquired in naturalism, or at least can contain more.

the urge to transcend oneself The urge, or drive, to transcend oneself takes various forms. First, it is sometimes said to be the urge to do good things for other people instead of focusing only on one’s own good, such as doing something that is

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generous or empathetic. Second, it is sometimes said to be the urge to do something that is big and important, such as participating in an innovative and momentous project. It is also sometimes said, third, to be the urge to identify with something “larger” than oneself, or the desire, more specifically, to identify with something supernatural, such as the Divine One. And, last, sometimes it is not specified to which of these one is referring. Julian Baggini appears to fall into the last category: “There does seem to be a widespread, if not universal, human urge to achieve transcendence. Life seems unsatisfactory when it concerns only our individual existence” (Baggini 2004: 87). Irvin Yalom appears to fall into some version of the third category: “Human beings are extraordinarily comforted by the belief that there is some supraordinate, coherent pattern to life and that each individual has some particular role to play in that design” (Yalom 1980: 426). Ernest Becker sometimes refers to the second kind of urge, as when he talks about immortality projects, described in Chapter 3, and occasionally to the third, as when he declares that “the only way to get beyond the natural contradictions of existence [is] in the time-worn religious way: to project one’s problems onto a god-figure, to be healed by an all-embracing and all-justifying beyond” (Becker 1973: 285). Most believers in the Divine One probably maintain that all or nearly all people have the urge, or continuing impulse, to transcend oneself in the third sense, the sense in which one wants to identify with something supernatural, even though they may not recognize it as such. Naturalists can concur with believers in the Divine One who say this, though when they do, they will go on to say, with Baggini, that “we cannot assume that just because we feel this desire, it can be satisfied” (Baggini 2004: 87). And also with Baggini they might say that the drive to transcend oneself is satisfied by being altruistic toward other humans (87), in accordance with the first sense of the drive. Or they might say, with Yalom, that the proclivity to believe in a supraordinate pattern is satisfied by identifying with what is not supernatural, such as the cultural patterns one is immersed in or the workplace patterns in which one is enmeshed. Here, again, believers in the Divine One will say that adding satisfaction of the urge to transcend oneself in the third sense to satisfaction of the urge in the first two senses enhances one’s sense of meaning significantly. In saying this, believers in the Divine One need not diminish the value and satisfaction of the urge to transcend oneself in the first two senses. But they will assert that satisfying the urge to transcend oneself in the third sense significantly increases the total value and satisfaction one obtains and thereby significantly enriches the meaningfulness of one’s life.

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Part of the enrichment of satisfying the urge to transcend oneself in each of the three ways, for both naturalists and theists, is knowing that it is morally important not to be entirely and constantly self-focused. As Susan Wolf put it earlier, the universe is big, and there is a good deal more than just one’s own concerns. One needs, morally, to acknowledge the value of the concerns of others and adopt virtues and emotions that involve these concerns. For the believer in the Divine One, the importance of not being constantly self-focused extends to acknowledging that humans have a loving creator toward whom one can have the virtues and emotions described in the preceding section. There would be something amiss if one did not have gratitude, reverence, or love toward one’s creator. Having these virtues and emotions brings enrichment to one, and so does knowing that these virtues and emotions are a morally important response to the fact of having a loving creator. Both of these contribute to making life more meaningful for the believer in the Divine One. This last point can be brought to bear on a key element in the connection one can have to the Divine One, namely, knowing that one matters to the Divine One. Phillip Kitcher, a naturalist, states, “Mattering to others is what counts in conferring meaning” (Kitcher 2014: 101). Charles Taliaferro, who quotes Kitcher, infers from Kitcher’s declaration that a relationship with the Divine One would be a “source of unfathomable delight” (Taliaferro 2016: 143). Such a relationship would, Taliaferro says, be “maximally excellent” (145). There are three thoughts here: humans matter to the Divine One, it is maximally excellent that humans matter to the Divine One, and humans can delight in this maximal excellence. As Taliaferro states, the delight comes from knowing that one matters to one’s loving creator. The enhanced meaningfulness comes from this delight. If one also has the belief that the delight is intrinsically good, then there is even more enhanced meaning because that belief is also an intrinsic good. It is an additional intrinsic good, not just to have the delight in mattering to the Divine One, but to believe that this delight is an intrinsic good. And this additional intrinsic good adds to the meaningfulness of one’s relationship to the Divine One. Those who regard contemplation of the Divine One as supremely good will say that the urge to transcend oneself is superlatively fulfilled with such contemplation. They also often say that contemplation of the Divine One enhances the meaning of one’s life more than any other activity. Aquinas says this because he believes, with Aristotle, that the rational nature of humans, the “intellect,” is the “highest” element in humans, the element, that is, that distinguishes humans from animals and the element

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that is most akin to the Divine One. Because the intellect is the highest element in humans, according to Aquinas, its activities will be the most valuable and therefore give the most meaning to humans. When the intellect contemplates the Divine One, humans have what Aquinas calls “beatitude” (Aquinas 1947: 305 [Summa Theologica I, Q 62, A 1]). A fatal problem with Aquinas’s view is that the conception of human nature on which it rests regards emotions, feelings, and desires as belonging to a “lower” element in humans than the intellect. This means that emotions, feelings, and desires have less value than the deliverances of the intellect. And this entails that they do not play as important a role in acquiring meaning than does the intellect with its contemplation of the Divine One. But if emotions, feelings, and desires do play an important role in acquiring meaning, as I have maintained, then Aquinas’s intellectualist conception of beatitude is too narrow. It does not seem to contain many of the virtues and emotions that can appropriately be directed to the Divine One, such as gratitude and delight in sensing that one matters to the Divine One. Though contemplation of the Divine One is one way in which the urge to transcend oneself can be satisfied, it is not the only way. The conception of human nature, which leads to saying that it is the only way, needs to be replaced with a conception in which emotions, feelings, and desires have at least as much value as the intellect.

curing existential boredom It may seem as though there is a conceptual connection, or at least a strong psychological connection, between believing in the Divine One and curing existential boredom, such that the former automatically leads to the latter, or at least often tends to lead to the latter. But the psychological complexities involved in believing and in boredom are such that one cannot predict that the believing will invariably relieve the boredom. But when it does, it does so in a way that enriches the meaningfulness of one’s life beyond ways that naturalists can use to cure existential boredom. One reason for this last claim is that believing in the Divine One gives one an additional stimulus for pursuing meaning in the four ways of acquiring meaning described in Chapter 4. The additional stimulus is to please one’s loving creator. What this stimulus does is to increase the significance of the subjective component in Susan Wolf’s assertion, quoted earlier, that both subjective attraction and objective attractiveness are involved in meaning (Wolf 2010: 9). This subjective attraction, Wolf states, involves caring “fairly deeply about some things” and being

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“gripped, excited, interested, engaged” (9). Wanting to please one’s loving creator can be something one cares about deeply, something, in fact, that grips one and engages one at a high level. It is this caring and being gripped that has the strong potential for curing existential boredom and that also enhances the meaning of one’s life. Those who do not believe in the Divine One can, of course, also be excited about and engaged in intrinsically good activities. But full engagement with the Divine One adds an absorbing and fervent element to that excitement and engagement, thus amplifying the subjective attraction involved in meaning. A second reason for thinking that believing in the Divine One can be a more enriching cure for existential boredom is that one can value life more when it is felt to be a gift from a loving creator. The analogy here is to receiving a gift from someone whom one values, such as a parent, child, sibling, or friend. Receiving that gift can prompt one to value it more than if one had bought it for oneself or had simply happened to find it someplace. What adds to the value of the gift is recognizing that the giver values the recipient. In like manner, recognizing that one’s life is a gift from a loving creator can prompt one to appreciate it more highly than if it were a product of an impersonal universe. A loving creator clearly values what it creates. And the recognition of this tends to undercut existential boredom, which may spring from not valuing one’s life. When one does value one’s life highly, one is much more likely to possess a zest for living, a devotion to pursuing intrinsic goods, and an eagerness to be engaged in projects and activities of value, both telic and atelic.

an existential move Now I want to make an existential move based on the claim that believing in the Divine One enhances the meaningfulness of one’s life. The existential move is to say that those who do not believe in the Divine One should be distressed by this claim. The nonbeliever has three options: to deny the enhancement claim, to be indifferent to it even if it is true, or to be distressed by it. Denying the enhancement claim is unreasonable because there are too many intrinsic goods that can be, and often are, experienced as a result of believing in the Divine One. Being indifferent to the claim is unreasonable because intrinsic goods possess inherent attractiveness – a moral “pull.” To be indifferent is to ignore that attractiveness. It is to say with a shrug of one’s shoulders, “Believing in the Divine One brings more meaning?? So

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what!” This is what appalled Pascal. Only distress or something akin to it remains. Uneasiness is a milder reaction to the enhancement thesis than distress, and despair is a stronger reaction. Some form of fairly strong reaction by the nonbeliever is needed because the enhancement thesis entails that those who do not believe in the Divine One are missing something highly valuable, something that is maximally excellent, to use Taliaferro’s phrase. The idea of possessing maximal excellence is, again, the idea of possessing the most that one is capable of possessing. There is a large difference between not possessing such excellence and possessing it, not just a small difference. The absence of maximal excellence should cause those who do not believe in the Divine One to have the moral pain of grief and anguish. It should cause disappointment and sorrow that the universe is not such as to allow one to experience additional enhancing goods, in the same way that a child would be bitterly disappointed at having to miss a long-expected birthday party. The absence of maximal excellence should also cause nonbelievers to look more extensively into what could legitimately prompt them to believe in a divine creator. The options of the nonbeliever can be illustrated by Jean-Paul Sartre’s declaration that human life is a useless passion (Sartre 1956a: 784). He makes this claim because, he says, all humans fundamentally, deep down, desire to be God. But they cannot, as God does not exist – the very idea of God, a causa sui, something that causes itself to exist, is contradictory. One could, of course, respond to Sartre by saying that the desire to be God is illicit. But if one accepts his claim that life is a useless passion, the inability to be God creates a dilemma: Should one simply shrug their shoulders and say, “It doesn’t matter”? Or should one be in deep distress because one cannot fulfill one of life’s basic cravings? Sartre chose the latter option. That one cannot be God – a for-itself and an in-itself, in Sartre’s terms – is of extreme importance and should cause one to have a high level of concern (Sartre 1956b: 292–302). In effect, Sartre is saying that the fact that life is a useless passion should not simply be set aside as if it were a trivial part of an afternoon’s musing. It should, rather, be intensely and profoundly concerning. The analogous claim with respect to the enhancement thesis of this chapter is that not having the intrinsic goods involved in the enhancement of meaning that comes from believing in a divine creator should not be thought of as an unimportant and nonessential matter. It should be regarded as a serious and grave privation, one that is worth grieving over.

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Those who do not believe in a divine creator might respond to the enhancement thesis by saying that they can certainly accept it: if the Divine One were to exist, believers in the Divine One would have enhanced meaning. This purely hypothetical claim, the nonbeliever continues, does not conflict with the assertions that there is no divine creator and that there is no higher meaning than what can be acquired within a naturalist framework. The enhancement thesis is like saying that if people could travel to other galaxies, their lives would be enriched with extraordinary vistas of stunningly beautiful galaxies and star clusters, with visits to planets that are inhabited by humanlike creatures, and with similar priceless experiences. This hypothetical assertion is irrelevant to the enrichment of human life, nonbelievers can say, because, as things currently stand, no one has the remotest possibility of traveling to other galaxies. So even if this intergalactic enhancement thesis were true, it would not make any difference to the meaning of human lives as we know them. That meaning must be determined apart from what is involved in intergalactic travel or, by analogy, apart from what is involved in believing in the Divine One. There are, however, two differences between intergalactic travel and believing in a divine person that make a difference with respect to the enhancement thesis. The first is that no one has ever had experiences involved in intergalactic travel, whereas numerous people have had experiences springing from belief in a divine person. These include the experience of having a larger context in which to situate one’s meaningfulness, of having virtues and emotions that one would not have if one did not believe in a divine creator, of having the urge to transcend oneself satisfied with one’s love for a divine creator, and of having one’s existential boredom relieved by believing in a loving creator. The fact that there is something more than simply imagining experiences that are prompted by belief in a divine person makes the existential move I have described legitimate. The nonbeliever is right to say that the existential move would be no more legitimate than a similar move for the absence of intergalactic travel if experiences prompted by belief in a divine person were only imagined. But they are not. A second difference between intergalactic travel and believing in a divine person is that the latter involves experiences that are central to human life whereas the former does not. Although intergalactic travel would decidedly enrich one’s life, one can have a full and rich life without it. One cannot, however, have a full and rich life without an overall context for one’s life, without possessing certain virtues and emotions,

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without satisfying the urge to transcend oneself in a maximal way, and without curing or preventing existential boredom. These are essential ideals for human life. One should want to maximize them. So those who do not believe in a divine person should admit, “I am missing a great deal because there is no divine creator. I am deeply sad that the universe is that way.” This distress and sadness apply also to the absence of desires for experiences that believers in the Divine One say are satisfied by believing in the Divine One. Nonbelievers might say that they do not have desires for experiences of a divine person’s love for them or for contemplating the nature of a divine being. So it is no loss, they will infer, not to have these experiences in this life or in an afterlife. However, the enhancement thesis and the existential move are meant to apply to desires for experiences that can be had by believing in the Divine One as well as to such experiences. One need not be distressed by not having a desire for intergalactic travel or for numerous other particular activities because these are not essential to a full human life. But not having desires for additional virtues and emotions or higher levels of transcending oneself or more effective cures for existential boredom should be distressing. These desires are for intrinsic goods that can enrich one’s life essentially. Those who believe in the Divine One should not think that the existential move is only for those who do not believe in a divine person. Those who do believe in the Divine One should also lament the absence of intrinsic goods that they could experience but do not. I shall deal with obstacles that prevent both believers and nonbelievers from maximizing intrinsic goods in Chapter 8.

7 Life after Death

If personal survival is true, then the eternal joy of God at the good deeds of his creatures would be a joy in which those who have lived well will somehow share. (Cottingham 2016: 135)

This chapter, like the last one, argues for an enhancement thesis: believing in life after death enhances the meaningfulness of one’s predeath life. The chapter also argues for an additional enhancement thesis by showing how experiences in an afterlife can be significantly meaningful. This second enhancement thesis, which I shall call the postdeath enhancement thesis, shows how an afterlife enhances the overall trajectory of human life compared to a trajectory in which there is no afterlife. I shall support both enhancement theses by going through each of the four categories in the previous chapter – context, additional virtues and emotions, the urge to transcend oneself, and a cure for existential boredom. I shall be assuming that individuals will live after death forever and that the Divine One will be involved in it in several ways: the Divine One placed a desire for continuing, conscious existence into humans, the Divine One brings it about that this desire will be satisfied after they die, and the Divine One will be intimately involved with humans after they die. The idea behind these assumptions is that life after death is a divinely established augmentation, or enlargement, of life before death for those who genuinely desire the intrinsic goods that will be experienced after death. I shall also be assuming that in some way humans retain their identity after they die, with intact memories and continued desires and interests. 112

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This assumption is needed so that individuals can regard their postdeath experiences as enhanced when compared to their predeath experiences. It is their postdeath experiences that are enhanced and not the experiences of a different self, even though there are differences between predeath and postdeath experiences. A full defense of the postdeath enhancement thesis requires that these assumptions be made plausible, which is beyond the scope of this book. For those who are not convinced of them, this chapter can be read as what would, or could, be the case if they were true.

context Thomas Morris, who was quoted in the last chapter as stating a version of the Context Principle that applies to meaning and the Divine One, invokes it also for life after death: “The question about whether there is life after death should not be just a question about whether we are to expect one more segment of existence, however long, after bodily death. It should be viewed as a question about the overall context for all our actions in this life” (Morris 1992: 25). This overall context includes the idea of an all-encompassing narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. Neverending life after death does not, of course, end in one sense, but in the all-encompassing narrative it functions as an end in a different sense. This different sense can be grasped by looking at the general features of the allencompassing narrative in the theistic religions of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism: humans are born into a world in which they must make something of themselves. They do this with varying levels of success, then die after seven or eight decades. But this is not intended to be the final end, for humans can experience a new state in which the difficulties of predeath life cease. A more specific way to put the narrative is to say that humans were originally made by the Divine One with a morally perfect nature, but fell from it by rebelling against the Divine One. Human life is characterized by a struggle to return to the original perfection, but it uniformly fails. After death, however, some humans at least will experience the original perfection again in the presence of the Divine One. Their lives will have been redeemed from ultimate failure. Two features of narratives contribute to a sense of meaningfulness: the narratives’ intended movement and their endings. These two are tied together because the intended movement is designed to take one toward the ending. This movement is not just traversing event after event without direction. It has a theme to it, a theme that ties the movement to the ending

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and that gives significance to the events that one traverses. Novels and stories often contain such movement – the events depicted in them are part of a plot that goes someplace. Someone who has read the novel or story can see how this is so. The same is true of human narratives, or at least of ideal human narratives. In an ideal human narrative, there is movement from an imperfect exemplification of intrinsic goods to a perfect exemplification of intrinsic goods, given that humans have departed from their original perfection. This movement is the overarching story that makes sense of all that humans do, or at least of what humans do who actively pursue the exemplification of intrinsic goods. Thomas Morris had this pursuit in mind when he wrote, “Those who believe in an afterlife do not, by virtue of their belief, devalue this life. Rather, they embrace a larger context that infuses much greater value into the small things of this life” (25). This larger context involves the Divine One’s desire that humans have a welllived life, one in which the overall theme is the pursuit of intrinsic goods. The details of the pursuit of intrinsic goods are woven into a fabric whose overall pattern confers the details with significance. The fabric for a human life is chronological – it unfolds as a life progresses and is completed after one dies. A key idea in this conception of ideal human narratives is that the desire for continuing, conscious existence, placed into humans by the Divine One, is not merely to keep on existing. The self-preservation instinct of insects and animals might consist of this. For humans, though, the desire to keep on existing is fused with the desire to experience more goodness. More specifically, it is the desire to experience goodness perfectly, without fatal obstacles and without taint of mixed motives or resistance. This desire is what drives the human pursuit of meaning. It spurs the movement in an ideal narrative. The ideal human narrative fits people to varying degrees and seems not to fit some people at all. Some go astray, some do not care much about goodness, and others defiantly reject the pursuit of goodness. Susan Wolf’s Blob, a person who spends countless hours doing little more than watching television, a person who lives “in hazy passivity, . . . unconnected to anyone or anything, going nowhere, achieving nothing” (Wolf 2013: 306–7), seems not to have much desire for intrinsic goods either in this life or the next. Wolf’s Useless Person also seems not to care for the continuation of goodness in an afterlife. The Useless Person, unlike the Blob, is active, but her life is wholly occupied with what is “silly or decadent or useless” (307). An instance of such a person is “one of the

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idle rich who flits about, fighting off boredom, moving from one amusement to another” (307), somewhat like Sheralyn in Chapter 1. Such people are not much attracted to an afterlife in which satisfaction in experiencing intrinsic goodness is predominant. Or, what is closer to the truth, most people have mixed sentiments about the pursuit of goodness in an afterlife, desiring it, being indifferent to it, and resisting it in varying proportions. And the desiring, indifference, and resistance may be conscious and explicit or may be submerged beneath conscious awareness. Those whose desire for an afterlife is submerged may vastly outnumber those whose desire is conscious and explicit. In an intriguing and haunting passage explicating the idea of not being fully conscious of the desire for the pure goodness of an afterlife, C. S. Lewis writes, “There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven; but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have desired anything else” (Lewis 1996: 149). Lewis mentions a number of activities in which the desire may be latent: reading books we love, standing before a stunning landscape, being occupied with our hobbies, having lifelong friendships. About these and the desire for heaven he says, “All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it – tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest – if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself – you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say ‘Here at last is the thing I was made for’” (150–1). If Lewis’s conjecture is on target, most humans experience the desire for an afterlife as through a pulsating fog. The attractiveness of an afterlife that is replete with maximal goodness is fleetingly experienced, glimpsed in rare moments, recognized for what it really is only sometimes, and even then, vaguely. As for resisting an afterlife of pure goodness, if Soren Kierkegaard’s frequent references to defiance in his Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing are correct, everyone also resists goodness to some degree and thereby resists the idea of its continuation in an afterlife. Sometimes that resistance may manifest itself in a conscious and forceful “no.” Mostly, though, it is buried in the network of attitudes, values, and emotions that make up one’s character. If Kierkegaard had read Lewis’s description of the submerged desire for the continuation of goodness beyond death, he might have said that a submerged resistance to goodness is also present to some degree in numerous activities and recognizable explicitly only if one is fully aware of their inner recesses. The resistance to, and the desire for,

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goodness coexist, Kierkegaard says: “Just as a person, despite all his defiance, does not have the power to tear himself away completely from the good, because it is the stronger, he also does not even have the power to will it completely” (Kierkegaard 1993b: 33; 1956: 64). One does not have the power to will goodness completely because of the force of one’s defiance. But one is not purely defiant, either, as the good is still attractive no matter how much defiance inhabits one. No human, that is, is an unadulterated devil. If everyone has both a desire for and a resistance to a goodnessfilled afterlife, what can be said about life after death as a context for meaning? Perhaps the best way to put the matter is to say that an all-encompassing narrative involving an afterlife with intrinsic goods can serve as a context for meaning. It is what the Divine One desires for humans. But some humans may ultimately reject it. That is, the resistance to goodness in them may be stronger than their desire for goodness. We can picture such people at a final tally, to use Ernest Becker’s apt phrase (Becker 1975: 4), coming to the realization, as a result of the light that the Divine One casts onto their memories, that they never really genuinely loved goodness much or that they resisted it more than they loved it. If this were so, we would have to say that those lives were much less meaningful than they could have been. Others, however, who embrace and love goodness as a dominant motif in their lives would regard the afterlife as the outgrowth and culmination of a lifetime pursuit of goodness. In this latter case, belief in an afterlife would serve as a context that enhances meaning, both predeath and postdeath. Without either the Divine One or life after death, there would be no such context. In the naturalist worldview, which does not include individual consciousness beyond death, there can be no “completion” of a person’s life because the movement from imperfection to perfection stops short of its goal. There are, to be sure, narratives of individual lives in the naturalist worldview that can be meaningful to a degree. But the postdeath enhancement thesis states that narratives involving life after death with its “completion” of goodness can be much more meaningful than narratives that end at death. This is because humans value endings and completions that involve the acquisition of goodness or that confer additional meaning on the events that contributed to the ending. So even though human narratives that stop at death can have some meaning, there is enhanced predeath meaning, and overall meaning, if the narrative continues beyond death in the way described.

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Naturalists typically respond only to the claim that meaning requires an afterlife without considering whether an afterlife would enhance meaning. Susan Wolf supports her denial of the claim that meaning requires an afterlife by saying, “My own view about this position is that it expresses an irrational obsession with permanence” (Wolf 1997: 215). Wolf uses her belief in objective morality to say that predeath human life is worthwhile and therefore that one need not believe that human lives must last forever to have meaning. Brooke Alan Trisel, who does not believe in objective morality, the Divine One, or life after death, concurs with Wolf: “Although our works will not last forever, this should not matter if we accomplished what we set out to do when we created these works” (Trisel 2013: 443). If, Trisel continues, we imagine ourselves looking back at all of human life after it has become extinct, we “will not conclude that our efforts amounted to nothing. Rather we will conclude that many people made remarkable accomplishments that made their lives, and possibly the lives of others, better than they would have been if these goals had never been pursued. And if we expand our evaluation, as we should, to take into account all experiences associated with living, not just goal-related experiences, we will conclude not that life was empty, but that living was worthwhile” (443). Because Trisel does not believe in objective morality, we must construe his use of “evaluation” and “worthwhile” as something like “being satisfied that one’s desires were fulfilled.” For him, then, being satisfied that one’s desires for achieving goals and acquiring other experiences are fulfilled makes life worthwhile even though it ends in extinction. Last, Todd May, who believes that the universe is silent, believes also that “there are ways of living that offer narrative meaningfulness without their having to be built into the structure of the universe. They are valuable ways of living, themes that offer a particular kind of worth, even if they do not reflect any ultimate telos of human existence” (May 2015: 77). The narrative that constitutes one’s life, May says, can be meaningful even though it is not derived from anything that is a necessary part of the universe and even though it ends in death. In response to these claims, those who adopt the postdeath enhancement thesis can say, with Wolf, that objective morality can, indeed, be used to determine that a predeath human life is meaningful, but that this does not mean that it is irrational to believe that an afterlife is also meaningful. The same objective morality that assesses the meaningfulness of predeath life can be used to declare that a postdeath life would be even more meaningful. They can also say that it is not an obsession to believe in a meaningful afterlife if its meaningfulness makes the afterlife attractive

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and sets predeath life in a wider context. Those who adopt the postdeath enhancement thesis can believe, with Trisel, that a person can have a satisfying life even if it is extinguished at death, but that it would be much more satisfying if there were more satisfactions after death. Again, believers in the postdeath enhancement thesis can concur, with May, that human lives can consist of meaningful narratives even though those narratives do not exemplify any ultimate telos of the universe and do not continue beyond death, but that humans could have much enhanced narratives if they did continue to live beyond death. Up until now, I have been assuming that human lives are, or at least can be, narratives. But Galen Strawson objects. Some people, including himself, live episodically and not narratively. The self-experience of one who lives episodically is such that “one does not figure oneself, considered as a self, as something that was there in the (further) past and will be there in the (further) future” (Strawson 2004: 430). The self-experience of one who lives narratively, by contrast, is such that “one naturally figures oneself, considered as a self, as something that was there in the (further) past and will be there in the (further) future” (430). The one who lives episodically has past experiences, to be sure, but these experiences do not figure in their current self-experience, unlike the one who lives narratively, for whom past experiences do figure in their current self-experience. The relevant point that Strawson makes, for my purposes, is that “the strongly Episodic life is one normal, nonpathological form of life for human beings, and indeed one good form of life for human beings, one way to flourish” (432–3). And “it would be a great mistake to think that the Episodic life is bound to be less vital or in some way less engaged, or less humane, or less humanly fulfilled” (431). It is both a fact and a good thing that some people live episodically, that is, nonnarratively, Strawson states. Accordingly, the one who lives episodically can do equally meaningful things and have an equally meaningful life as one who lives narratively. The distinction between having a past and a future, on the one hand, and figuring oneself, considered as a self, to be something that was in the past and that will be in the future, on the other, is not likely to be grasped easily by those who live narratively, as Strawson notes: “Diachronics [those who live narratively] and Episodics are likely to misunderstand one another badly” (431). So instead of trying to explicate the distinction, I am going to appeal to what seems to me to be a basic intuition: everyone has some chance of living a meaningful life (though not always an equal chance). On the basis of this intuition, we can infer that the ideas embedded in the narrative way of thinking about meaning that I have

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employed, abstracted from their narrative context, are also applicable to those who live episodically. Those who live episodically will, after all, have a future – a death and an afterlife. Their afterlife can be meaningful in the same way that their predeath life is meaningful, namely, by pursuing intrinsic goods. And if the postdeath enhancement thesis is true, having an afterlife would make their overall life more meaningful. So the principles embodied in a narrative way of conceiving of one’s life should be able to be abstracted from narrativity, as understood by Strawson, and translated into an episodic way of conceiving of one’s life.

an additional virtue More than three decades ago in an Introduction to Philosophy class, I asked students, one by one, what made their lives worthwhile right then. We were doing a short section on the meaning of life, and it occurred to me that asking students that question would make the topic more connected to their daily concerns. One of the students – Cristyn – answered with just one word – “hope.” I did not know anything about Cristyn that would have prompted this one-word answer. She may have been in the midst of hard family or school circumstances. She may have been suffering from depression or been deeply hurt by a recent breakup of a romantic relationship. Her face gave no clue, and I did not ask for elaboration, but simply said, “thanks,” and moved to the next person. What struck me about Cristyn’s answer is that it sounded as though hope was the only thing that made her life worthwhile then. Perhaps it was the only thing that was keeping her alive. It was at least prominent in her life, even if it lay underneath her everyday conscious awareness and rose to the surface only when I called on her. It probably was not hope for a life free from pain after death, but most likely was for the amelioration of something painful that was occurring then. Nor probably was it about exemplifying moral virtues better, else she likely would have specified that. The important additional virtue that is pertinent to life after death is hope. It may be had because one is suffering in some particular way, as was the case with Cristyn, or it may be had because one desires a fuller or even maximal exemplification of goodness after one dies. In this second way, hope is a profoundly moral virtue because the one who hopes looks forward to a time when they will experience goodness to a higher degree, including loving the Divine One and accepting fully the Divine One’s love for one. It may be thought that focusing on hope detracts from the value of predeath life – by pinning one’s hopes on a better existence after death, the

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value of predeath life is demoted. It may even be thought that having hope for a better postdeath life is to dismiss predeath life as simply a veil of tears one must plod through with a heavy and yearning heart until one can be released by death into a bright and joyous eternity. This critique of hope misconstrues hope. It need not be the only or even the dominant virtue of predeath life. It can be accompanied by numerous this-life virtues, all of which are rightly pursued by one who hopes. This fact means that one who hopes need not denigrate predeath life, but can value it highly. Moreover, the presence of hope enhances the meaning of one’s predeath life in several ways: one believes that one’s desire for maximal virtue will be satisfied, which itself is satisfying; one believes that one will be fully in the presence of one’s loving creator, which again is itself satisfying; and one believes, again with satisfaction, that one’s current exemplification of virtue will be remembered and valued by the Divine One and by oneself after death, so that the narrative of one’s life is completed. A more radical objection to hope comes from Albert Camus’s The Stranger, in which Monsieur Meursault lives without belief in God, objective morality, or life after death: “Nothing, nothing had the least importance, and I knew quite well why” (Camus 1946: 152). Meursault’s reason for thinking that nothing has any importance is that all alike are “condemned to die one day” – “What difference could it make if, after being charged with murder, [one] were executed because he didn’t weep at his mother’s funeral, since it all came to the same thing in the end?” (152). Meursault has been convicted of murder. He is in solitary confinement awaiting a public execution. He becomes angry when the prison chaplain tries to convince him that there is a God. That anger empties him of hope, which prompts him to lay his “heart open to the benign indifference of the universe” (154). The only thing he can look forward to is “that on the day of [his] execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet [him] with howls of execration” (154). It does not take much to infer that Meursault, and Camus through Meursault, believes that hope is morally gratuitous, given that there is no God, life after death, or objective morality. The universe is wholly indifferent to human concerns without these, Meursault believes. He is right. Nothing would be morally worth hoping for if none of these existed. Meursault’s anticipation of howls of execration at his execution may give him satisfaction, but it would not be a satisfaction that is based on moral worth. Is there a place for hope without a divine creator and without life after death if there is objective morality? Susan Wolf might well say that there is. Because we can distinguish between good and not-good, and good and

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not-so-good, we can distinguish between hope for what has worth and hope for what does not have worth. So if the Blob or the Useless Person had a change of heart and hoped for a more meaningful life, one that is based on objectively valuable activities or emotions, their hope would not be morally gratuitous. Not only would the actual change be objectively better, but the hope would have objective worth, Wolf might say. She would be right. With objective morality, it is not the case that nothing is morally worth hoping for in predeath life. There is a difference, however, between this predeath hope and hope for perfect goodness in an afterlife. Though there is enhancement in the former, compared to Meursault’s valueless existence, there is much more enhancement in the latter. If there will be perfect goodness in an afterlife, then the “much more” enhancement that exists if there is an afterlife is a maximal enhancement. For life beyond death would be at the highest moral level that is possible for humans, given the perfect goodness of the Divine One and the truth of statement (2) in Chapter 1: the Divine One desires that humans satisfy their desires for intrinsic goods and right pleasures. The Divine One’s desires for humans would not be just that they satisfy their desires for intrinsic goods and right pleasures some of the time or imperfectly, but that humans satisfy them all the time and perfectly. This last point follows from what Nicholas Waghorn calls the “perfection thesis,” which claims that “if we take the fact of our lives’ exemplifying a certain property as bestowing meaning on those lives, then, ceteris paribus, we will wish our lives to exemplify that property maximally” (Waghorn 2016: 118). This property that bestows meaning, in the terms I have been using, is the property of exemplifying intrinsic goods and right pleasures. If Waghorn’s thesis is true, as it seems to be, then it would be natural for humans to desire that intrinsic goods and right pleasures be exemplified in their lives to a maximal extent. This maximal exemplification of intrinsic goods and right pleasures is the whole point of life beyond the grave, given that before death no humans measure up completely to the Divine One’s desires. Hope for maximal satisfaction of desires for intrinsic goods and right pleasures after death is, accordingly, a legitimate and desirable virtue in predeath life, one that enhances predeath life considerably.

the urge to transcend oneself Satisfaction of the urge to transcend oneself in an afterlife enhances meaning significantly because it is free of the dividedness that afflicts humans before death. Dividedness occurs when one is both attracted to and resists

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goodness, or is both attracted to and indifferent to goodness. One desires to love and revere the Divine One, yet resists doing so or is indifferent to such love and reverence. One desires to be fully known and fully loved by the Divine One, yet resists these as well or does not care about them. This dividedness makes these virtues of transcendence to be exemplified both intermittently and imperfectly in predeath life. Without this dividedness in the afterlife, however, one can continuously and perfectly exemplify the virtues of transcendence. As a result, one will, to use Richard Swinburne’s words, have “supreme happiness derived from doing successfully what is supremely worthwhile” (Swinburne 2016: 161). Obstacles to a maximal satisfaction of the urge to transcend oneself will be gone. One of these obstacles, perhaps the main obstacle, is the “fat relentless ego.” This insightful phrase comes from Iris Murdoch: “In the moral life the enemy is the fat relentless ego” (Murdoch 1971: 52). Murdoch is not using “ego” in a technical sense, such as the Freudian one. She means simply that the enemy in the moral life is too much absorption with one’s own concerns. She explains this claim by saying that “the chief enemy of excellence in morality (and also in art) is personal fantasy: the tissue of self-aggrandizing and consoling wishes and dreams which prevents one from seeing what is there outside one” (1971: 59). By “fantasy” she means “blinding self-centered aims and images” (67). This tissue of blinding selfcentered aims and images forms a “powerful system of energy” (67) that undermines one’s “attention to reality” – to what is other than oneself, including beauty and love (67). Murdoch is here talking about what I have called the virtues of transcendence – the virtues that are other-centered, including compassion for other humans in distress, but also love and reverence for the Divine One. The fat relentless ego – the tissue of selfaggrandizing desires – taints one’s perception of these virtues so that one does not appreciate their value as much as one could. It thereby diminishes one’s desire for them. One is less moved to love the Divine One and less energized to allow oneself to savor the love of the Divine One. The dividedness occurs because one is pulled in opposite directions – one both desires and does not desire to love the Divine One. And, it should be noted, one can be divided about one’s own dividedness – one can obtain a certain pleasure from the desires of the fat relentless ego. Giving that pleasure up so that one can have purity of heart – an undivided desire for the good – can itself be both desired and resisted. What is needed to counteract dividedness, and dividedness about dividedness, is something that can incapacitate the fat relentless ego. Murdoch’s “attention to reality” has this ability. It can break down the

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system of energy comprised of self-centered aims and images: “What counteracts the system is attention to reality inspired by, consisting of, love” (67). With full attention to reality, to another’s plights and delights, and to the Divine One, dividedness will disappear. This last assertion may seem like the much-criticized Socratic claim that knowing what is good is sufficient for doing the good. But Murdoch is not putting forward a simple Socratic claim – that knowing what is good will automatically lead to doing the good – for, as Murdoch writes, attention to reality is inspired by love. Actually, she states, attention and love are fused. So the attention she has in mind consists not just of knowing what is good. It includes love for the good. And love is a strong motivating force. Still, this more robust Socratic claim can be critiqued: love for the good is not always strong enough to counter the powerful system of energy in which the tissue of self-aggrandizing wishes and dreams resides. The wild, expansive ego is extraordinarily difficult to tame before one’s death. This critique is right. Predeath life is rampant with crippling dividedness. Who can say that they are free of it? But those who experience the presence and power of the Divine One intimately and intensely in an afterlife will be free of it. This fact means that the overall narrative of life that includes an afterlife with its virtues of transcendence is richer in meaning than a life that does not. It also means that the predeath hope for an undivided love of the good beyond death enhances predeath meaning.

curing existential boredom Cristyn’s hope gave her energy to keep going. This is true of all hope – it stimulates and energizes. And with energy of the right kind, boredom disappears. Cristyn probably was not afflicted with boredom, but if she had been, a lively hope would have given her something to which she could look forward. This would have prompted her to become engaged with life. Boredom cannot exist with such engagement. Boredom can, to be sure, be present with busyness, but not with the kind of absorption that hope produces. Hope enlivens and gives one a sense of purpose. This is true both for hope for something better predeath and hope for something better postdeath. Although the former hope eliminates existential boredom, in which one is concerned about the fact that one has no desires for anything, it does not do so nearly as strongly as the latter hope. In the latter hope, one hopes for an afterlife in which one will have a much more intimate involvement with one’s loving creator. This creates a strong desire to

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experience that involvement. It also generates a high interest in the virtues and emotions one has prior to death, especially the virtues and emotions of transcendence, such as joy, love, and gratitude. They will be valued highly postdeath, so they matter predeath, one feels. This feeling creates a strong desire to experience these virtues and emotions predeath, thus undercutting existential boredom in a second way. With hope in an afterlife, one no longer identifies with Sisyphus, for whom everything consisted of “futile and hopeless labor” (Camus 1983: 119), or with Mersault, for whom nothing had the least importance. Undercutting existential boredom does away with sloth, one of the seven deadly sins in the Christian tradition. Although sloth is commonly thought of only as a disinclination to do things, commentators have frequently pointed out that there is much more to sloth than laziness. Solomon Schimmel writes, “Physical laziness is a small part of what sloth referred to in the past. The sin of sloth has two components: acedia, which means a lack of caring, an aimless indifference to one’s responsibilities to God and to man, and tristitia, meaning sadness and sorrow” (Schimmel 1997: 193). Hope for a more intimate involvement with one’s loving creator in an afterlife undoes both of these components of sloth. It prompts one to care about the Divine One’s desires for one’s life, eliminating aimless indifference. And it prompts one to be glad about exemplifying virtues and virtuous emotions, eliminating sadness and sorrow. I have been assuming that the afterlife is not boring. Bernard Williams challenges this assumption in his “The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality” (Williams 1973). Williams cites a play in which a woman is given a magic potion that allows her to live forever, provided she continues taking the potion. Three hundred years later, at the age of 342, she decides that life is no longer worth living because she has become incurably bored. She stops taking the magic potion and dies. The reason for boredom in an eternal afterlife, Williams says, is that one cannot provide “any model of an unending, supposedly satisfying, state or activity which would not rightly prove boring to anyone who remained conscious of himself and who had acquired a character, interests, tastes and impatiencies in the course of living, already, a finite life” (1973: 94–5). There is no emotion, activity, or condition in postdeath life, Williams states, that could prevent eventual boredom, given that in predeath life one has acquired numerous interests and tastes. If Williams is right, then life after death would not be worth looking forward to, would not be a valued component of a meaningful life, and would not cure existential boredom either now or then.

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Several responses can be made to Williams’s challenge. The first is to point out that many religious people have thought that there is at least one unending state that will not prove to be boring in an afterlife, namely, a loving, direct, and highly satisfying perception of the Divine One. Thomas Aquinas calls this direct perception of the Divine One a “beatific vision,” and he thought that it could be had continuously, forever, in a state of perfect happiness: “In regard to this perfect happiness . . ., man’s mind will be united to God by one, continual, everlasting operation” (Aquinas 1947: 595 [Summa Theologica I-II, Q 3, A 2, RO 4]). Aquinas considers complexities involved in a human mind’s operation that is united to the Divine One, but these can be set aside for the present purpose, which is to assert that it is possible to conceive of an endless state that meets Williams’s two criteria of an unending, nonboring life. These criteria are, first, that such a state can always be satisfying and, second, that it must grow out of a person’s character, interests, and tastes in a predeath life. The first criterion is reasonable because otherwise constant boredom could not be averted. The second criterion is also reasonable because otherwise there would be a serious issue whether the person experiencing the postdeath state was identical to the predeath person. These criteria can be met if predeath people desire to have a loving, direct, and satisfying perception of the Divine One. This desire may not be fully conscious in very many people prior to death. But it need only be half-conscious, perhaps intertwined with one’s everyday activities, as described by C. S. Lewis in his statements about desiring heaven. In such a case, it may not have been clearly identified as a desire for a loving and direct perception of the Divine One. It must, however, be the sort of desire that later could be identified as such a desire. An analogy to falling in love fits here. Often people cannot fully specify the kind of person they hope to fall in love with. But when they do fall in love, they often can identify the person whom they love as one whom they had long desired to love. And they often want the love to continue endlessly, or at least as far into the future as they can see. In the same way, one whose initial desire for a loving and direct perception of the Divine One is vague and indeterminate and who later has that desire satisfied will be able to identify their desire and will want to continue to have it satisfied. They will not be bored by having it satisfied forever. Augustine’s declaration that human hearts are restless until they rest in the Divine One can be parsed in the same way (Augustine 1991: 3). Augustine need not assume that humans know precisely why they are

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restless. He must assume, though, that when humans find their rest in the Divine One, they will recognize that rest as a cure for their restlessness. And humans can have that rest forever without becoming bored by it, just because the rest is perceived as the satisfaction of a desire. Aquinas seemed to think that the only thing one will be doing in the afterlife is having a loving, direct, and maximally satisfying perception of the Divine One. His Aristotelian conception of human nature, with the rational part having the highest function, leads him to believe that the supreme predeath good is contemplation of truth: “In this life there is nothing so like this ultimate and perfect happiness as the life of those who contemplate the truth, as far as that is possible in this life” (Aquinas 1945: 112 [Summa Contra Gentiles III, 63]). This highest good is carried through to postdeath life, and nothing else is: “The contemplation of truth begins in this life, but will be consummated in the life to come; while the active and civic life does not transcend the limits of this life” (113; Summa Contra Gentiles III, 63).1 This single-activity conception of postdeath life contrasts with the conception of a postdeath life as a mix of activities, states, and emotions, all of which are a continuation of the character, interests, and tastes one has already acquired during predeath existence. John Martin Fischer adopts this conception: “An immortal life could consist in a certain mix of activities, possibly including friendship, love, family, intellectual, artistic and athletic activity, sensual delights, and so forth” (Fischer 2013: 407). He regards this claim as a response to Williams’s argument against immortality, which, Fischer says, seems to presuppose that there should be just one satisfying state or activity in an endless life. If there is a mix of activities, states, and emotions, however, one would have a much higher potential of having an endless life without ever being bored. This mix conception of postdeath life can be combined with Aquinas’s loving and direct perception of the Divine One by invoking a distinction Fischer makes in another response to Williams’s charge of boredom. This distinction is between self-exhausting pleasures and repeatable pleasures. One tends not to want to repeat self-exhausting pleasures after having once experienced them, such as hiking to the top of a formidable mountain just to prove that one can do it. But one does wish to enjoy repeatable pleasures, such as eating fine meals, listening to beautiful music, or even hiking to the top of a formidable mountain, after having once experienced them, though with suitable intervals (408–11). Postdeath life, Fischer states, need not consist simply of self-exhausting pleasures but can also contain repeatable pleasures. Because repeatable pleasures can be had in

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different contexts and with different objects, such as eating different foods, listening to different music, and hiking to the tops of different mountains, it is possible for them to be enjoyed endlessly. And because there are numerous pleasures of each kind, probably many more repeatable pleasures than self-exhausting pleasures, one can imagine never getting bored in an endless life, even if some of the repeatable pleasures were never repeated. Aquinas’s loving and direct perception of the Divine One would be a repeatable pleasure that could be fused with experiences of other repeatable and self-exhausting pleasures. That is, activities involving these pleasures could be the means through which a loving and direct perception of the Divine One is had. Or it might be that the perception hovers in the background of repeatable and self-exhausting pleasures and comes to full awareness from time to time. This conception of a loving and direct perception of the Divine One does not, to be sure, fit Aquinas’s conception of it as constant and uninterrupted. Still, one who is sympathetic to what Aquinas says and who is also attracted to Fischer’s conception of a mix of activities can modify the former so as to fit the latter. In these ways, then, an afterlife can be conceived to be full of interestevoking activities. A lively hope to experience these activities can, accordingly, be a cure for predeath existential boredom. In addition, these thoughts, along with those in previous sections of this chapter, can be used to answer an objection to the possibility of life after death put forward by Samuel Scheffler. He states that we “can make little sense of immortality” that is understood as a continuation of predeath life as we know it (Scheffler 2013: 97). Several considerations show that this is so, he says. One is that human life involves stages. The goals, activities, pursuits, and challenges people engage in are indexed to the stage of life they are in, from birth, maturation, deterioration, to death (96). Another is that humans spend considerable effort in trying to avoid, minimize, learn from, and cope with “loss, illness, injury, harm, risk, and danger” (96–7). Without these realities, human life would be “radically different from our own” (97). Still another consideration is that, without stages or these realities, it is not clear that immortal people could have any values, for values, Scheffler states, can guide us only in the context of these stages and realities: “The aspects of life that we cherish most dearly – love and labor, intimacy and achievement, creativity and humor and solidarity and all the rest – all have the status of values for us because of their role in our finite and bounded lives” (100). An eternal existence would, accordingly, be bland and boring. The best response to Scheffler’s objection is to say that an afterlife as conceived by the theism of Christian, Islamic, and Jewish traditions is said

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to be like predeath human life in some ways and to differ from it in other ways. One of the important ways in which it differs involves the overall trajectory of predeath and postdeath life as a movement from moral imperfection to moral perfection. In this overall trajectory, or “grand drama,” an afterlife is conceived to be free of the self-deceptions, dividedness, ulterior motives, suffering, moral pain, and other impediments to a perfectly virtuous life, some of which are described in Chapter 8. This perfectly virtuous life is, indeed, radically different from predeath human life. It is meant to be so by the divine creator. For the Divine One created human life with the intention that it perfectly exemplify intrinsic goods and right pleasures, including transcending oneself by perfectly loving the divine creator. Those whose desire for this perfection is a predominant part of their character will find the afterlife highly desirable, even if it departs from some modes of predeath human living. It will feel to them like an “eternal rest” from the stress of fighting temptation and warding off moral harm. At the same time, Scheffler is right to maintain that postdeath life needs to contain some similarities to predeath life or else we would not be able to make much sense of it, and it would not be satisfying as a continuation of predeath life. Here Fischer’s self-exhausting and repeatable pleasures are pertinent. Both of these are embodied in creatively achieving goals, acquiring virtues and emotions, and giving and receiving love, namely, the ways of acquiring meaning described in Chapter 4. All these can exist in an afterlife, and all of them involve movement, that is, striving and effort, often with a beginning, middle, and end, though not, in the afterlife, from moral imperfection to moral perfection. And they spring from deeply held desires placed into humans by the Divine One. These deeply held desires will, according to the theism of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, be satisfied fully in an afterlife. This means that an afterlife can be made sense of as a continuation of some important features of predeath life, though as the first response states, not of all. Martha Nussbaum might object that movement in an afterlife must involve struggle against moral imperfection if the afterlife is to be a continuation of predeath existence: “One can have plenty of striving and effort in an immortal life,” she states, “provided that some limits are held in place,” including struggling against “pain, weakness, the bad conduct of others, poverty, injustice, athletic injury, and so forth” (Nussbaum 2013: 37). It is, indeed, necessary that at least some predeath limits be retained in an afterlife if there is to be movement, else one could get to the top of a mountain or produce a work of art with the snap of

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one’s fingers. However, if an afterlife is replete with moral perfection, movement would not involve the limits in predeath life that derive from moral imperfection, such as injustice or the bad conduct of others. Here one can think of noncompetitive play, which does not involve a beginning, middle, and end, or production of a work of art, which does, but both of which involve effort. If we think of activities in an afterlife as resembling one of these, then it will contain enough resemblance to predeath existence to count as a continuation of that existence.

the existential harm of death with extinction Epicurus famously declared that we humans should not be afraid of death because when we are dead we will not be conscious of anything. And because pain of any sort requires being conscious, we can experience no pain after we die: “Death is of no concern to us, since all good and evil lie in sensation and sensation ends with death” (Epicurus 1964: 54). Epicurus’s point is that we cannot fear something that will not hurt us, and we will not be hurt after we die because we will not exist then. There is, however, harm involved in ceasing to exist after we die, namely, the cessation of experiencing intrinsic goods. One way to get at this harm is to ask, as Don Marquis does, What is wrong with murdering someone? He answers that doing so “deprives one of all the experiences, activities, projects, and enjoyments that would otherwise have constituted one’s future” (Marquis 1989: 189). These experiences, activities, projects, and enjoyments “are either valuable for their own sakes or are means to something else that is valuable for its own sake” (189). Marquis supports his answer with several considerations, one of which is that it accounts for the fact that we regard killing as one of the worst crimes because it deprives people of experiencing any future good. Another is that people who die prematurely believe that what makes their death a bad thing for them is that they will not experience future goods. Marquis’s answer seems right. The harm inflicted in killing someone is that they can no longer have valuable experiences. Their hopes and dreams are extinguished. They cannot pursue goals, be creative, exemplify virtues, have emotions, or be engaged in loving relationships. Marquis’s answer can also be applied to human death with extinction, not just killing or premature death. Death with extinction deprives people of any future good. It follows that death is bad if it involves cessation of existence. Death would be a harm to the overall trajectory of one’s life, even though one is not alive after death to experience the harm.

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Here the existential move of the last chapter is pertinent. If death is a harm, we humans should be distressed by it, distressed that we will not be able to experience any of the intrinsically good activities after we die that we so love to experience now. For Epicurus to say that death is of no concern to us is to disregard the existential harm of death. He is right to say that we need not fear what will happen to us after we die if we know that it involves extinction, but is wrong to set aside the fact that extinction deprives us of experiencing more intrinsic good. This fact is cause for concern and distress. Bryan Magee, in his article, “Intimations of Mortality,” expressed this concern (Magee 2011). He was in his eighties when he wrote “Intimations,” and he found himself wondering in a new way what would happen when he died: “What I consider most likely to be true is that death will be the complete and utter end of my existence, with no successor existence of any kind that can be related to me as I now am” (39). But he did not want this: “What I want to be true is that I have an individual, innermost self, a soul, which is the real me and which survives my death . . . . But alas, I do not believe it” (39). Magee’s “alas” carried his concern. He did not say more about this concern, unfortunately, as his “alas” was in the very last sentence of his article. But we can imagine it. He will not be able to call to mind the successes he has had in his long life, the positive emotions he has experienced, the love he has given and received. He will not have intimate contact with a divine creator who will say to him, “You have done well,” and with whom he can have delightful and appealing interaction. These lacks are, indeed, worth a passionate and distressing “alas.” Could a believer in the Divine One say that there is no life after death? John Cottingham thinks so. He bases his thought on the idea that what confers meaning on human actions is that they will be remembered forever by the Divine One: “If standard theism is true, then our actions will be held forever, or are eternally present, in the mind of a supremely good and loving and wise God, and so will have ultimate significance” (Cottingham 2016: 131). Here Cottingham combines Ernest Becker’s final tally with the idea that the Divine One’s remembrance of human actions forever confers ultimate meaning on them. This would be so, he further says, even if humans did not live beyond death: “Even if we are indeed wholly mortal, our lives, on the theistic picture . . . would retain, eternally, their moral significance by being present to God” (132). So, Cottingham states, humans could take comfort in the fact that the Divine One remembers their actions

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forever even if they will be extinguished at death. However, he continues, it would be a “bonus” if humans did live beyond death. In that case, they would share the Divine One’s remembrance of their good actions, as Cottingham states in the epigraph to this chapter. John Hick disagrees with Cottingham. For him, living beyond death in communion with the Divine One is partly a solution to the problem of evil and partly a recognition of the existential harm of death: “If it be God’s plan to create finite persons to exist in fellowship with himself, then it contradicts both his own intention and his love for creatures made in his image if he allows [people] to pass out of existence when his purpose for them remains largely unfulfilled” (Hick 1963: 52). In this, Hick states another reason for regarding death with extinction as a harm: it does not allow people fully to exemplify the Divine One’s purpose for them. In terms of the four ways of acquiring meaning described in Chapter 4, Hick’s claim is that humans, predeath, do not always pursue intrinsically good goals, either by neglect or by intention; they are not always creative when it would be desirable for them to be; they do not always strive to exemplify worthy virtues and emotions when they could, including the virtues of transcendence toward humans and toward the Divine One; and they have not always been loving toward family, friends, or strangers. The claim Hick is making is that human lives, all of them, are partly failures. And this is not what the Divine One desires for any human. Death with extinction would, accordingly, be a harm both to humans and to the Divine One, even if one acquires additional meaning by virtue of believing in the Divine One during predeath existence, and even if the Divine One eternally remembers all the intrinsic goods one experienced during predeath existence. If the postdeath enhancement thesis is true, then life after death would not merely be a bonus, as Cottingham asserts, but morally desirable. The postdeath enhancement thesis may seem as though it is the same as Cottingham’s bonus theory: one can have a more meaningful predeath life by believing in the Divine One, and one would have an optional addition to predeath meaningfulness by continuing to live on after death. On this view, human life could be fully meaningful even if there were no life after death. However, if the postdeath enhancement thesis is true, then human life overall would not be fully or maximally meaningful if one did not live beyond death, even if one experienced predeath intrinsic goods that accrue by virtue of believing in the Divine One. One would have maximal meaning only if one experienced postdeath intrinsic goods as well as predeath

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intrinsic goods. And maximal meaningfulness is not just morally optional, but is morally desirable, in a strong sense of “desirable.” If Hick’s rectification view of life after death is correct, then the goods of postdeath life would be both an addition to predeath goods and a remedy for the failures of predeath life. Cottingham’s bonus view does not account for the fact that some people do not do very many meaningful things, such as Susan Wolf’s Blob and Useless Person, or Kierkegaard’s defiant person. If the Divine One created humans to do good things and enjoy right pleasures, it would be a human failure when humans did not do good things or enjoyed wrong pleasures or had undesirable emotions or failed to pursue intrinsic goods when ability and opportunity were present. The opportunity to rectify these in an afterlife satisfies both the divine and the human desire for redressing failure. And it satisfies both the divine and human desire for humans to experience intrinsic goods without dividedness. This means that all the enhancements involved in a theistic framework, predeath and postdeath, additions and rectifications, should be understood as morally desirable and not just as optional. Pascal would concur with the thought that the goods of postdeath life are morally desirable in a strong sense and not just as an option. His claim that people ought to seek enlightenment about their eternal destiny is based on the fact that what happens after they die is a matter of the greatest importance. One’s eternal destiny will, he says, be either eternal annihilation, eternal wretchedness, or eternal happiness with the Divine One (Pascal 1995: 134 [#428]). Each of the first two would be “undeniably terrible,” a “calamity” (134 [#428]). Given this importance, Pascal would not say that living in the presence of the Divine One after we die is merely optional, a bonus if it occurs, but not a loss if it does not. It would be a great loss if it did not occur. This is the reason he declares that everyone ought to care about what happens after they die in the moral sense of “ought.” And it is my reason for saying that life after death in the presence of the Divine One greatly enhances the meaning of one’s life – actually, maximally enhances it.

all or nothing? Some believers in the Divine One and in life after death state that if there were no divine person or life after death there would be no meaning at all. It is not that there is more meaning or that meaning is enhanced with a divine creator and life after death, but that without these, nothing humans do would be meaningful.

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Leo Tolstoy seems to adopt this all or nothing view. In his Confession, he says that one of the questions that haunted him during his crisis of meaning was, “Is there any meaning in my life that will not be destroyed by my inevitably approaching death?” (Tolstoy 1983: 35). He recounts an Eastern fable in which a traveler jumps into a dry well to escape a raging wild beast. The traveler sees a dragon at the bottom of the well with its jaws wide open. Fortunately, the traveler can prevent himself from dropping into those jaws by hanging onto the branch of a bush growing in a crevice of the well. Unfortunately, there are two mice, one white and the other black, who are gnawing their way around the branch. The traveler sees drops of honey on the leaves of the bush and licks them. That, of course, is no consolation, as the traveler will soon drop into the jagged jaws of the dragon. Tolstoy regards this fable as telling the sober truth about life. He is licking the honey, which once consoled him but now is no longer sweet (30–1). Honey cannot lose its sweetness, so Tolstoy must mean something else when he says that the honey of life is no longer sweet to him. What he means is that no activities can give his life meaning, given his stark realization that he will inevitably die. Among these activities, he includes both the “ambition, love of power, self-interest, lechery, pride, anger, vengeance” (17) that he gave himself to earlier, along with the family love, pursuit of knowledge, love of poetry, and writing world-class fiction that he immersed himself in later. None of these satisfies his need to find a meaning that cannot be destroyed by death. This need, he finally thinks, can only be satisfied through “the concepts of an infinite God, moral good and evil, the immortality of the soul, and a relation between God and the affairs of man” (63). These are the concepts, Tolstoy states, “without which there would be no life, without which I myself could not live” (63). At rock bottom, he wants a meaning that does not cease at death, one, that is, that he can experience after he dies. Having such a meaning, however, does not entail that predeath life would be meaningless if there were no life after death. Predeath meaning without life after death would not last beyond death, to be sure, but it would, nevertheless, be real. This assertion is based on the existence of objective morality. If there is objective morality, then it is legitimate to rank what humans do as more or less worthwhile, without regard to whether humans live after death. Aunt Betty is kind, gracious, and affectionate, but Cousin Natalie, a child of a different aunt and uncle, is constantly sarcastic, unwelcoming, and hateful. We do not hesitate to say that the one lives meaningfully and that the other does not, and we

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make this judgment independently of whether there is life after death. It is, therefore, legitimate to say that what humans do before death can be meaningful even if there is no life after death. The all or nothing claim is mistaken. A theistic conception of the meaning of life does not need it, though theism does need the postdeath enhancement thesis. An all or nothing advocate might respond that those who do not fulfill the Divine One’s purpose for their lives do not have any meaning because they do not live in accordance with the only thing that can give meaning. But by this criterion, no one will have any predeath meaning because no one, including believers in the Divine One, fully lives in accordance with the Divine One’s purpose, as stated in statements (1)–(4) in Chapter 1, namely, to exemplify intrinsic goods and right pleasures. And to say that the only place where there is meaning is in life after death is to adopt a dichotomy that is too harsh. Perhaps the all or nothing advocate will now make a shift – only those who believe in the Divine One have meaning. But believing comes in degrees, too. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, along with a host of religious believers, have taught us that believing as well as doing is fraught with dividedness, doubt, and hidden, ulterior motives. The best way to regard meaning is to think of it as had in degrees. It can be had fully only in the next life, but it can be had to an extent in this life by both believer and nonbeliever, with the believer having an opportunity to have a higher level of it.

8 Obstacles

Looking closer at this self of mine, I have found that it is all raging flames and inextinguishable fire, perpetual fighting and war between irreconcilable elements, incurable disease, unabatable anxiety, struggle incessant – except in death. (Ikhwân al Ṣafâ’ 1969: 352)

The aim of this chapter is to see whether four significant obstacles to acquiring meaning can be overcome. Existential writers have sometimes been somewhat pessimistic about the human ability to overcome these obstacles, and some religious writers have been quite optimistic about the prospect of conquering hurdles. I want to see whether one can find a balance between these opposite poles.

secretly guided and forced Friedrich Nietzsche declared that “by far the greater part of conscious thinking must still be included among instinctive activities” (Nietzsche 2000A: 201 [#3]). This is also true, he stated, of philosophical thinking. “Most of the conscious thinking of a philosopher is secretly guided and forced into certain channels by his instincts” (201 [#3]). Nietzsche is saying that conscious thinking is largely controlled by what is not conscious, which means that it is caused by unknown forces within the thinker. So, Nietzsche states, “every great philosophy so far has been . . . the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir” (203 [#6]). Conscious thought is mostly an “instrument” of one’s secret instincts (203 [#6]). 135

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Nietzsche’s declaration would not be pessimistic if conscious thought were a product only of secret instincts that are benign. But Nietzsche declares that the secret instincts producing conscious thought are fairly often not benign. This is true, too, he indicates, of many emotions, desires, and activities. Consider a few such instances. Neighbor love, he states, is largely a product of fear. Although there might be a display of “pity, fairness, mildness, reciprocity of assistance” (302 [#201]), which are characteristic of true neighbor love, “in the last analysis, ‘love of the neighbor’ is always something secondary, partly conventional and arbitrary-illusory in relation to fear of the neighbor” (303 [#201]; Nietzsche’s italics). He means to be saying that behind what appears to be neighbor love with its display of pity, fairness, mildness, and reciprocity of assistance, there lies a different motive altogether, namely, fear. The “honorary designation” of “virtue” is given to the apparent expression of pity and mildness (302 [#201]), but the reputed virtue is prompted by fear. This, of course, undermines the purity of the virtue, making it not a virtue at all. Nietzsche is also suspicious of the feelings of devotion and self-sacrifice, two admirable states that appear to be authentic, self-transcendent virtues. “The feelings of devotion, self-sacrifice for one’s neighbor, the whole morality of self-denial must be questioned mercilessly and taken to court” (235 [#33]). These feelings must be put on trial with a prosecutor, defense attorney, and jury. The defense attorney will argue that human nature possesses genuinely other-directed instincts and that devotion and self-sacrifice are radiantly beautiful products of these genuinely selfdenying instincts. The prosecutor will argue that human nature is not so lofty as the defense portrays it to be. The “beautiful, glittering, jingling, festive words” that the defense uses to portray human nature belong “to the old mendacious pomp, junk, and gold dust of unconscious human vanity” (351 [#230]). The prosecutor will be merciless. For every instance of devotion and self-sacrifice that the defense attorney recounts, the prosecutor will reply with equally convincing accounts of the ways in which feelings of devotion and self-sacrifice are but thin veneers hiding human vanity, which really is doing the propelling of the apparent otherdirected activity. Finally, the jury must decide whether the evidence for radiantly beautiful devotion and self-sacrifice outweighs the evidence for unsavory subterranean production of these lofty virtues. There seems to be little doubt as to which way Nietzsche thinks the jury should decide. At the same time, he seems to leave it open that at least some virtues are products of genuinely pure instincts, including honesty and exuberance, which are possessed by truly free spirits. (See Chapter 6,

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“Nietzsche’s Virtues: What Would He Make of Us?” in Solomon 2003: 137–74.) We do not need to enter into Nietzschean interpretation, however, to take seriously the Secretly Guided and Forced Obstacle to acquiring meaning. Nietzsche is at least saying that virtuous-seeming behavior is often a product of unbenign, unconscious motives. And this is enough for us to worry about whether supposedly meaningful activities and emotions really are what we think they are. Nietzsche, of course, is not alone in pointing out the likelihood of being controlled by unconscious motives that undermine the authenticity of one’s conscious life. Numerous psychologists, poets, novelists, and other writers have done so as well, including recently Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson, a software engineer and an economist, in their The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life. Unlike Nietzsche, who appeals to his own acute intuitions, Simler and Hanson cite a number of empirical studies that show that “we are strategically blind to key aspects of our motives” (Simler and Hanson 2018: ix). Moreover, they claim, the studies show that in a number of human endeavors, including charity, education, and religion, “our hidden agendas explain a surprising amount of our behavior – often a majority” (10). The hidden agendas cluster around self-interest (5). In donating to a charitable organization, one study found, people “give more when there are two solicitors than when there’s just one” (213). This shows, Simler and Hanson say, that visibility is a hidden motive for giving to charities. They concede that “we want to help others,” but say, “we also want to be seen as helpful” (221). It is no wonder that Nietzsche exclaims, “But you dolts!” when someone asks about love. “What? Even an action done from love is supposed to be ‘unegoistic’?” (Nietzsche 2000A: 338 [#220]). This obstacle to acquiring meaning can be given a religious twist. Someone who regards themselves as having faith in the Divine One and who is part of a community of faith may only want to be seen as having faith. Being seen as having faith gives one a certain regard or prestige in the community. It heightens one’s reputation. One feels admired. Soren Kierkegaard, who also seems quite pessimistic about acting from entirely pure motives, calls these “benefits” of belonging to a community of faith “rewards.” The case, mentioned in Chapter 3, of a man falling in love with a woman only for her wealth is used by Kierkegaard to illustrate the falsity of faith if it is prompted only by the lure of rewards. The man really only wants the woman’s wealth. He does not, in fact, love the women for her own sake. “The good is one thing; the reward is something else” (Kierkegaard 1993b: 37; 1956: 69). If one loves what is good or has faith only for the sake of the

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reward, one is not loving what is good or having faith. It only appears as if one does. To love what is good and have faith, one must love the good and have faith “without regard for reward” (1993b: 39; 1956: 72). This point is pertinent to the claim that believing in the Divine One enhances the meaning of life – if one merely thinks that one believes without actually believing, then meaning is not enhanced even though one thinks it is. This would be like thinking that one is acting generously when in fact one is acting only to be seen to be generous. In such a case, one would be a victim of self-illusion. The action that appears to be generous, both to others and to oneself, would not really be generous. The impure motive taints the action that springs from it. In the same way, what is believed to be meaningful is not really meaningful if it is a product of tainted motives. The possibility of illusory believing is haunting. It might be that one goes through their whole life believing that they were rightly pursuing meaning when in fact they really were pursuing social approval or exhibiting their vanity. Can meaning be rescued from this obstacle? Is it possible to have unadulterated desires for intrinsic good or singlemindedly to believe in the Divine One? The standard corrective to false believing is often said to be honest with oneself so as to become aware of one’s motives. Nietzsche appears to prescribe such honesty. “It would sound nicer if we were said, whispered, reputed to be distinguished not by cruelty but by ‘extravagant honesty,’ we free, very free spirits” (Nietzsche 2000A: 351 [#230]). What appears to be Nietzsche’s ideal person, the free spirit, is said here, in an elliptical way, to be known for their lavish honesty, which no doubt includes honesty with oneself. Nietzsche seems to have been thinking that without honesty with oneself, one will not be aware that one has unbenign, hidden motives that control one’s conscious life. But with self-honesty, one can become aware of these motives and thus root them out. Nietzsche might also have said that a rigorous and brutal self-honesty is rare because it is undercut by the ruses of the dear self, Iris Murdoch’s fat, relentless ego. The dear self likes to think of itself as pure and untainted. It does not like to think that it has been controlled by buried forces of which it is not aware . It has no inkling that its proclivity to think well of itself blinds itself to the truth about itself. With its inclination to think of itself as the center of the universe, the best that there is, it can scarcely admit that it has flaws. “Honest with oneself!” Nietzsche might laugh. “That is reserved for a few exceptional individuals who courageously dare to probe the inner recesses of their heart.”

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Nietzsche is right to state that self-honesty requires decentering and courage – decentering so that one’s perceptions of oneself are not skewed, and courage so that one does not flee in fear from unwanted self-revelations. Still, the number of people who have been honest with themselves must surely be a good deal higher than Nietzsche thinks. Autobiographical memoirs attest to this. So do admissions of guilt in therapists’ offices, self-revelations to trusted acquaintances in one-on-one conversations, and confessions in church, mosque, and temple. It might even be that everyone has had at least a few moments of self-honesty. To be sure, we humans are often blind to what goes on underneath our own conscious inner workings, but not always and not in every respect. Unfortunately, self-honesty does not always have the power to root out malignant motives. One can become aware of such motives and still be controlled by them. I can admit to myself that I want to be seen as helpful, denounce that motive in myself, yet still act on it. This is because my wanting to be seen as helpful is so entrenched in me and so captivating that I find it exceedingly hard to resist. The same is true of believing in the Divine One. I may find the prestige and reputation in my religious community that such believing confers so enticing that I cannot help acting as though I genuinely believe even though I know I am motivated by those rewards and even though I reject such motivation for believing. At the same time, it is possible that an awareness of an undecorous motive may be so disquieting and offensive to me that I take steps to retrain my hitherto secret instincts. I may focus so intently on the intrinsic good of helping others simply for its own sake that my instinct to be seen as helpful drains away, at least to a degree. I may train myself to set aside the prestige and reputation that derives from being in a religious community so that my belief in the Divine One is genuine, again, at least to a degree. Given both of these possibilities, what seems reasonable to say is that although being honest with oneself might not produce authentically meaningful actions, it also might. Being secretly guided by unbenign, unconscious motives might sometimes be a fatal obstacle to acquiring meaning, but sometimes it might not.

the lure of the crowd One common theme of existential writers such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, and Kierkegaard is that one must choose for oneself to make something of life. One must not let a group of people to which one belongs do

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the choosing. If one does let a group of people do the choosing, one is not living one’s own life. The meaningfulness one thinks one has is not one’s own. It belongs to the group. This fact explains why existential writers often use pejorative terms to refer to groups – the “herd” by Nietzsche, the “they” by Heidegger, and the “crowd” by Kierkegaard. The obstacle to meaning is that when one identifies with a group in the way Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Kierkegaard describe, one is simply imitating the group and not truly acting or thinking on one’s own. One does not act meaningfully because in a sense one is not acting at all. It is the herd, the they, the crowd, that is acting through one. Our guide here will be Kierkegaard. When, according to Kierkegaard, a person identifies with a group in such a way as to lose oneself in it, one does not do so simply by virtue of having similar beliefs and attitudes, but in a way that involves giving up control of one’s beliefs and attitudes. Kierkegaard expresses this condition by saying that one is characterized by “externality” (Kierkegaard 1993b: 148; 1956: 211). One is an “external person” and is in an “oblivion” (1993b: 134; 1956: 192), as if one is nothing – the person does not act, feel, or believe. The crowd does these for one. Kathleen Norris captures this condition nicely with respect to celebrities. “All too often, romantic love and fanatic devotion to celebrities are an attempt to escape the self, to ask another to be your self because the burden has become too much for you” (Norris 1998: 90). Kierkegaard draws an analogy to being in a cheering crowd to illustrate what happens when one becomes an external person. He quotes Plato to describe the cheering he has in mind: “There where the people come together in a great crowd, in the assemblies, in the theaters, in the camps or wherever else there is a gathering of the crowd, and there where with loud uproar they censure some of the things that are said and done and praise others, but in both cases with excessive cries and clamor and clapping of hands, there where even the rocks and the place where they are assembled echo the noise and repeat twofold the tumult of the praise and the censure” (Kierkegaard 1993b: 95–6; 1956: 143; quoted from Plato’s Republic 492B–C). With this kind of cheering, one is seduced to identify with the crowd and cheer with it. But with this identification, one is not aware that one has lost one’s identity. One is oblivious of oneself because one has become united with the crowd. By contrast, if one is in control of the excitement one feels when cheering with a crowd and consciously chooses to cheer with it, one is aware of what one is doing. One is not then in a state of externality and oblivion, but of individuality and responsibility. The trouble with obliviously cheering along with a crowd, for Kierkegaard, is not that the crowd is wrong. It might be cheering for

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what is good and right and booing at what is bad and wrong. The trouble is that one uses the crowd to evade responsibility for choosing for oneself. One hands the responsibility over to the crowd. This is an ultimate evasion because one is not really oneself, as it were. And, as with the first obstacle to pursuing meaning in which one did not know that one was really acting from an ulterior motive, one does not know that one is really being an external person, lost in the crowd, evading responsibility for pursuing meaning. We need to ask why Kierkegaard and other existential writers put so much emphasis on evading responsibility by identifying with a group. Aren’t there other ways of going wrong in life? Why do they pounce on groups? Kierkegaard says several things from which an answer to this last question can be constructed. In the first place, evading responsibility by hiding in crowds is alluring. “Number tempts,” Kierkegaard writes (1993b: 133; 1956: 192). It tempts because, as the next obstacle to pursuing meaning states, part of human nature does not want to pursue intrinsic goods. Instead of blatantly and brashly saying “no,” however, we do so under cover of the crowd, thinking that we can conceal our resistance. We do, after all, also want to pursue intrinsic goods, so we do not want our resistance to them to appear obvious. That is, we do not want our own conscience to find us out. Nor do we want the Divine One to notice. Not only do we hide from ourselves, but we hide from the Divine One as well. It is easier, we think, not to be seen when we are an anonymous participant in a cheering and booing crowd than when we are alone. In addition, we are continually surrounded by crowds. Our workplace contains a crowd. Our circle of acquaintances consists of a crowd. So do the organizations to which we belong. The churches, mosques, and synagogues we attend also consist of crowds. Whenever, in fact, we associate with one or two others, we are coming into contact with the makings of a crowd. The cheering and booing in each of these is not loud and tumultuous as it is in a stadium, but it is there nonetheless, quiet and compelling. Number tempts wherever there is number. “Where there are many there are externality and comparison and indulgence and excusing and evasions!” Kierkegaard declares (1993b: 148; 1956: 211). It does not matter whether the many are religious or secular. Both are just as alluring. Fear also moves us to engross ourselves in crowds. “Why, indeed, does a person run to join the crowd unless he is frightened!” (1993b: 136–7; 1956: 196). Identifying with a crowd, Kierkegaard is saying, alleviates our fear. What fear? – the fear of being an individual and having to choose for oneself.

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In escaping into a crowd, we “cowardly avoid being the single individual” (Kierkegaard 1998: 108). This fear is more than fear. It is terror – a fear so fierce that we shrink in panic and dread. Kierkegaard has discovered what he believes to be a rock-bottom drive in human nature – the terror of being an individual – and what he thinks we do to satisfy the drive – lose ourselves in crowds. “The crowd is indeed always the strongest” (Kierkegaard 1993b: 132; 1956: 191), so it is nearly impossible to resist identifying with it. Ernest Becker has made Kierkegaard’s analysis of hiding in crowds one of the central themes in his The Denial of Death. Earlier we saw that Becker believes that what lies behind nearly all that we do is the need to believe that we have eternal significance and that death undermines this significance. It ends all the projects we have pursued, topples the monuments we have erected, severs us from our dear possessions. To face these truths head-on, Becker states, we have to do so alone – no one else can confront our death for us. We are, of course, intensely fearful of this confrontation: “The most terrifying burden of the creature is to be isolated, which is what happens in individuation: one separates himself out of the herd. This move exposes the person to the sense of being completely crushed and annihilated because he sticks out so much, has to carry so much in himself” (Becker 1973: 171; see also Chapter 5, “The Psychoanalyst Kierkegaard,” 67–92). Our remedy for this fear is to identify with others – a celebrity, a group of like-minded people, a whole culture even. They become a shelter for us. To escape the fear of facing our deaths alone, then, we hand ourselves over to others. Becker calls Kierkegaard’s description of hiding in crowds a “breathtakingly penetrating . . . analysis of the human condition” (68). The allure of hiding in crowds, the ubiquity of crowds, and the terror of sticking out all explain why Kierkegaard focused on being an individual. For him we cannot pursue what is worthwhile authentically unless we come to grips with our propensity to hide in crowds. It is clear, then, that the stakes are high – the highest one can imagine. This is why he declares that “to be a single individual . . . is a human being’s only true and highest significance” (Kierkegaard 1992: 149). It is important to note that by being an individual Kierkegaard did not mean “being different from others,” that is, acting differently, believing differently, and having different attitudes from everyone else, or at least from those with whom one associates. If this is all Kierkegaard meant by being an individual, there could be no such thing as a group of like-minded people, each of whom authentically pursues intrinsic goods. Kierkegaard recognizes the possibility of such a group when he says that humans can

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“sympathetically give heed to people and events” while being individuals (Kierkegaard 1993b: 131; 1956: 189). This means that we can be individuals even though we are like everyone else in a group. Kierkegaard is not recommending that everyone isolate themselves from groups. That would be absurd, and impossible. He is only recommending that the consciousness of being an individual “penetrate [one’s] life relationships” (1993b: 137; 1956: 197). “You are not asked,” he states, “to withdraw from life, from an honorable occupation, from a happy domestic life – on the contrary, that awareness will support and transfigure and illuminate your conduct in the relationships of life” (1993b: 137; 1956: 197). We may have intimate relationships with others, but there is an “even more intimate relationship,” one in which individuals relate themselves to themselves before the Divine One (1993b: 129; 1956: 187). The key element in being an individual for Kierkegaard is not separation from crowds, but being fully responsible to the Divine One. “Each human being, as a single individual, must account for himself to God” (1993b: 127; 1956: 185). We can think of Kierkegaard, along with Heidegger, Sartre, and Nietzsche, as philosophical evangelists. They want people to embrace lives of authentic meaning. The point of their astute and lengthy analyses of evasion, bad faith, and hiding in crowds is to awaken people from their existential illusions. Given that this is so, these existential writers must believe that people really can be awakened to lives of authentic meaning. At the same time, their extensive descriptions of ways in which people fail to have that meaning are so compelling that one wonders whether anyone can escape evasion. Here again there is ambivalence. Perhaps everyone has the capability of resisting the lure of hiding in crowds, but perhaps only some people ever really resist the lure. It may be that Kierkegaard had both of these sentiments, for he remarks, “And this is my faith, that however much confusion and evil and contemptibleness there can be in human beings as soon as they become the irresponsible and unrepentant ‘public,’ ‘crowd,’ etc. – there is just as much truth and goodness and lovableness in them when one can get them as single individuals” (Kierkegaard 1998: 10–11). I, too, am going to leave the matter with this ambivalence.

“but not yet” This ambivalence about the ability to resist the lure of losing oneself in crowds is rooted in a deeper ambivalence – humans both desire what is good and resist it. This is illustrated poignantly in Augustine’s prayer for the Divine One to heal him of lust: “Grant me chastity and continence, but

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not yet” (Augustine 1991: 145 [Bk. 8, Ch. 7]). Augustine explains the “but not yet”: “I was afraid you might hear my prayer quickly, and that you might too rapidly heal me of the disease of lust which I preferred to satisfy rather than to suppress” (145 [Bk. 8, Ch. 7]). It is clear that Augustine both fiercely wanted to be healed but just as fiercely did not want to be healed. He was highly ambivalent – ardently attracted to chastity, but just as strongly repelled from it. It is also clear that Augustine was highly conscious of his internal conflict. He was engaged in a “burning struggle” with himself, “deeply disturbed in spirit” (146 [Bk. 8, Ch. 8]). He did not want to observe himself even though he stood naked before himself (144, 145 [Bk. 8, Ch. 7]). This dividedness is different from pursuing what is good with an ulterior, unbenign motive that constituted the first obstacle to finding meaning. There one did not love what is good because one’s real motive was to satisfy an ulterior motive. Here one genuinely loves what is good and just as genuinely resists it. This is the essence of this third obstacle for finding meaning – one wants to pursue intrinsically good projects, but also resists doing so. One wants to be creative, yet also wants simply to follow an existing mold. One desires to be virtuous and to have intrinsically good emotions, yet counters these desires with mind-numbing pleasures. One yearns for love, both the giving and the receiving, but finds indifference and fear and resistance within one. At bottom, the desire for meaning is countered by a brute “no.” The idea that all resistance to what is good and right comes from a brute “no,” however, needs to be qualified. Although one sometimes finds a conscious “no,” more often resistance is buried in a tangle of motives and desires. Kierkegaard’s description of the psychology of resistance is pertinent here. “If willing does not agree with what is known [to be right], then it does not necessarily follow that willing goes ahead and does the opposite of what knowing understood (presumably such strong opposites are rare)” (Kierkegaard 1980: 94). That is, if one finds oneself overtly resisting what one knows to be good and right, one does not automatically do what is bad or wrong knowing that it is bad or wrong. Such brute resistance is infrequent. One postpones overt resistance to what is good and right to mull things over: “Rather, willing allows some time to elapse, an interim called: ‘We shall look at it tomorrow’” (94). And during the time of postponement, “knowing becomes more and more obscure, and the lower nature gains the upper hand more and more” (94). Knowing what is good becomes clouded, and the resistance has less opposition. The “no” becomes softened and less conscious. Thus, “gradually, willing’s objection to this

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development lessens; it almost appears to be in collusion. And when knowing has become duly obscured, knowing and willing can better understand each other; eventually they agree completely, for now knowing has come over to the side of willing and admits that what it wants is absolutely right” (94). Over time, resistance has so clouded the knowledge of what is good and right that the knowledge is no longer operative. In fact, the knowledge has pretty much ceased to exist. “And this,” Kierkegaard states, “is how perhaps the great majority of men live: they work gradually at eclipsing their ethical and ethical-religious comprehension” (94). The conscious inner conflict no longer exists. Resistance has won by fighting subversively instead of flagrantly and openly. The brute “no” has been replaced with a submerged “no,” but one that is still effectual. Surely Augustine and Kierkegaard are right about dividedness. Humans are a mixture of desires for what is wholly and cleanly good along with desires that undermine these first desires. There is delight in pure and unadulterated love, yet there are impulses for self-congratulation and controlling others that oppose the love. Sometimes the two sets of desires consciously wrestle with each other, but more often they are intermingled in a morass of emotions, desires, and thoughts. Goodness thus becomes less of a consideration in what one does and desires. Resistance is no longer directly responsible for unbenign motives, but occurs earlier in the chain of internal events that lead to the unbenign motives. One’s internal life is a hodgepodge of knowing and ignorance, willingness and unwillingness. When Augustine asks, “Who can untie this extremely twisted and tangled knot?” he is referring to this tangled mess (Augustine 1991: 34 [Bk. 2, Ch. 10]). Somewhere in the tangle are desires for good and desires to resist the good. Sometimes they are close to the surface. More often they are buried within the tangle. It should not be supposed that people who believe in the Divine One are exempt from this dividedness. Resistance to the good does not leave entirely just because one acquires such believing. It may decrease because of the believing, and love for what is good may increase. But some level of resistance remains. Nor should it be supposed that those who do not believe in the Divine One only resist goodness. They, too, desire goodness. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who spent eleven years in Russian labor camps and in exile, gets at what seems to be the truth about humans, both those who believe in the Divine One and those who do not: “Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human

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heart – and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains . . . an unuprooted small corner of evil” (Solzhenitsyn 1975: 615). If these things are so, then the epigraph for Chapter 1 must be modified – “Human beings are sometimes hungry for significance.” Humans are, indeed, sometimes extremely hungry for significance and fiercely reject the idea that life is one trivial thing after another. But sometimes humans are also not very hungry for significance, and it is sometimes tolerable, perhaps even welcome, that life consist of one trivial thing after another. Is the dividedness in this third obstacle fatal to acquiring meaning? It can be, certainly. However, if Solzhenitsyn is right that the line between desires for what is good and resistance to those desires oscillates with the years, there is some hope. Two ways of making the line move in the right direction undergird this hope. The first is Aristotle’s conception of virtues as habits, described in Chapter 1. Virtuous habits can become deeply ingrained in one’s character, and when they do, they naturally spring from the firmly held values of a person. The more firmly held values of the right sort there are, the less resistance to what is good there is. The second way of moving the line between desires for the good and resistance to them is by following Simone Weil’s remedy, mentioned in Chapter 3, namely, to attend to what is good, that is, to think about it and pay attention to it. One can do this by deliberately doing things that will prompt one to think about what is good or simply by calling to mind what is good. The operative principle here is that one’s increased attention to something can cause one to be captivated by it. Turning one’s mind to pure goodness makes the desire for it become so strong that it drives out what is contrary to it, bit by bit. With these two ways in which the line separating desires for intrinsic goods and resistance to these desires can move in the right direction, it may be that, as years pass, one can have some success in rooting out resistance to goodness. Hope for this success is worth having. It may be a fragile hope, though, given that one may be divided even over whether one wants to be rid of the resistance.

constricted circumstances, impaired wills, and suffering Aristotle noted in his Nicomachean Ethics that the cultivation of virtue depends in part on the “external goods” one has: “Happiness obviously needs the presence of external goods as well, since it is impossible, or at

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least no easy matter, to perform noble actions without resources. For in many actions, we employ, as if they were instruments at our disposal, friends, wealth, and political power” (Aristotle 2014: 14–15 [1099a31– 1099b1]). Although Aristotle is interested in the conditions needed to perform “noble” actions, what he says is also true for pursuing meaning. Think of Robert, referred to in Chapter 1, who was in solitary confinement in a six-by-nine cell for years. He undoubtedly had limited opportunities to pursue goals or connect lovingly to others. Other conditions, too, can restrict opportunities for meaningful activities. The death of one’s spouse or the involuntary loss of a loved job are two such conditions. So are serious false accusations or severe bodily injuries. In these situations, one’s grief, sense of dispossession, anger, emotional distress, or physical pain can overwhelm one so much that one feels unable to pursue anything meaningful. Numerous other conditions can also make one feel debilitated, such as constant illness or difficult family members. In such conditions, there is impaired desire, impaired ability to exercise responsibility, and impaired ability to make choices about one’s life. These three ideas can be gathered under the idea of an impaired will. This impaired will can become an obstacle to one’s ability to pursue a meaningful life. One prominent condition that illustrates this impairment is the oppression that black people in the United States have experienced. James Baldwin, writing in 1948, states, “I can conceive of no Negro native to this country who has not, by the age of puberty, been irreparably scarred by the conditions of his life. All over Harlem, Negro boys and girls are growing up into stunted maturity, trying desperately to find a place to stand” (Baldwin 1998: 53). Cornel West, writing in the early 1990s, states that one aspect of this scarring is nihilism, “not as a philosophic doctrine that there are no rational grounds for legitimate standards or authority,” but “the lived experience of coping with a life of horrifying meaninglessness, hopelessness, and (most important) lovelessness. The frightening result is a numbing detachment from others and a self-destructive disposition toward the world” (West 1993: 22–3; West’s italics). Christopher Lebron, writing in the 2010s, specifies another aspect of this scarring as “ethical disadvantage,” which, he states, opens “an inquiry into the quality and kinds of resources [blacks] have available to them with respect to being able to conceive and pursue a fully flourishing life within a social scheme that has marked them out as of lesser social value” (Lebron 2013: 104). If Baldwin, West, and Lebron, all of whom write from within black America, are right about the conditions in black America, then many

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black Americans possess an impaired will. Being scarred by the conditions in which they live, including hopelessness, lovelessness, and being told by a dominant white culture that they have less social value, produces this impaired will. Similar scarring, no doubt, is experienced by many women in male-dominated societies and by many of those in underclasses. Being born into wealth and in an upper class, it should be observed, also produces a kind of scarring in the form of limited values that restrict the range of perceived options. Robert M. Adams notes that one way to be scarred is to be surrounded by others whose lives lack meaning: “It can be very difficult, and for many impossible, to organize one’s own life around coherent purposes if one’s social context lacks coherent meaning” (Adams 2010: 81). Paul Froese, a sociologist, declares that social contexts can restrict people: “Most people in the history of the world have been victims of their times” (Froese 2016: 140). From this claim Froese infers that “we are never fully autonomous in determining our purpose” (140). Adams makes the same inference: “If our lives have meaning, we do not create it all by ourselves” (Adams 2010: 81). Aristotle is right. Without the right conditions, one finds it harder to live meaningfully. In my terms, one’s will is impaired – desires are marred, one has a decreased ability to exercise responsibility, and one’s ability to make choices is damaged. Without diminishing the extent of the scarring that black Americans and women have experienced, we can say that everyone’s will is impaired, in different ways and to different degrees.1 The idea of an impaired will contrasts with what can be called a “naked will” or a purely autonomous will. This is the idea of a will that has no impediments to making choices regarding good and bad, right and wrong. Immanuel Kant seemed to assume that humans possess a purely autonomous will. “Ought” implies “can,” he asserted: “If the moral law commands that we ought to be better human beings now, it inescapably follows that we must be capable of being better human beings” (Kant 2018: 6:50 [81]; Kant’s italics). If one has a duty to act in a certain way, then one has the ability to act in that way. And the degree of the ability must match the degree of the duty, which, apparently, for Kant is the same for everyone – everyone, that is, who is fully rational. Kant seems to have regarded women as less rational than men, or even nonrational, and he may also have regarded black people in the same way.2 For those who are fully rational, Kant’s “ought implies can” assertion entails the idea of a “moral democracy” – the idea that everyone who is fully rational has an equal chance at fulfilling one’s duty. And the idea of a moral democracy

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entails the idea of moral fairness – it would be unfair if not everyone who is fully rational had an equal chance at fulfilling their duties. Given this last idea, the will of a fully rational person must be autonomous. It cannot be impaired in any way with respect to duty. The assumption here is that duty governs all fully rational people to the same degree. The idea of a purely autonomous will seems also to be adopted by some existentialist writers. This is epitomized in Sartre’s story of a student who came to him asking for advice about whether to join the French Resistance during World War II or to stay home and take care of his aging mother. Sartre’s response was that existentialists do not give moral advice, except to say, “You are free, therefore choose” (Sartre 1956b: 295–7). The theory behind this response is that “from the moment that [a person] is thrown into this world he is responsible for everything he does. The existentialist does not believe in the power of passion. He will never regard a grand passion as a destructive torrent upon which a man is swept into certain actions as by fate, and which therefore, is an excuse for them. He thinks that man is responsible for his passion” (295). Sartre appears to be saying here that choice is always rock-bottom, uninfluenced by passion or at least not able to be overcome by passion. I do not want to become sidetracked by the intricacies of whether choice is independent of passion. What does seem true is that the complexities involved in Augustine’s twisted mass of inner knots, Kierkegaard’s collusion of willing and knowing, and the internalization of social forces into the lives of black Americans, women, and everyone else are more true to the facts than Kant’s and Sartre’s totally autonomous will. At the same time, one can take a lesson from Solzhenitsyn’s observation that everyone is mixed. An impaired will is not a totally disabled will. Even within hearts that are overwhelmed by circumstances over which they have no control, a small bridgehead of ability is retained. Kant and Sartre are right to believe in the ability to choose, though not in totally unfettered ability. There is no such thing as a naked will. Desires for intrinsic goods come in degrees, the ability to exercise responsibility comes in degrees, and the ability to make the right choices is had in degrees. Given that everyone has been surrounded by constricting circumstances in some way and to some degree, everyone has an impaired will to some degree. It is this degree that can become an obstacle to finding meaning. And it is also the fact that impairment is only to a degree, and not total, that is a cause for hope. Most of the time this hope can be realized only if one fights for meaning. It may be that everyone hungers for significance, but this does not mean that one automatically and easily finds it. Robert needed to have

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fought the debilitating effects of being in solitary confinement for long years. Black Americans must fight the scarring that has been inflicted on them. Women must fight to find meaning in a culture that denies them full opportunity to have it. Those who have lost a loved one or a loved job must fight the grief and disappointment that inevitably ensue. Everyone must fight the lure of the crowd and resistance to the good, and everyone must fight to unearth unconscious, ulterior motives. The threat of boredom and the fear of death must also be fought. Self-awareness and selfhonesty require a courage that is often too frightening to acquire, so one must struggle for them. It is the same for love, for it, too, does not come easily. People who believe in the Divine One must fight to retain that belief and to use it in pursuing a life of enhanced meaning. One is reminded here of Frederick Douglass’s famous observation, uttered in a social context of striving for racial equality, that “if there is no struggle, there is no progress . . . . Men may not get all they hope for in this world; but they must certainly pay for all they get” (Douglass 1857: 22). If what I have said about dividedness and an impaired will is right, the tragic truth about human nature is that everyone lets their impaired will diminish their hunger for significance. It is just as true, though, that nearly everyone’s hunger for significance is strong enough that they can fight for meaning no matter how much their will has been impaired. Kristin’s will must have been impaired significantly after she fell out of a tree when she was seventeen. She instantly and permanently became a paraplegic, confined to a wheelchair. But she did not let that impaired will constrain her forever. She went to college some years later. Though one of her hands was almost totally incapacitated, she could operate the controls on her motorized wheelchair with her other hand, and she could write with that hand, though slowly, if a pen were strapped to it. I found her to be kind and gentle. In the numerous contacts we have had since her college years, some by phone and some in person, I have never heard a bitter word or complaint from her. Her life is one of constant suffering because of her incapacitation, yet she is gracious, mild-spoken, and benevolent, unlike the wild teenager she once was. If Kristin had taken Arthur Schopenhauer’s thoughts on suffering to heart, she would not have remade her life into one of virtue and service. She would have had a “complete disappointment with the whole of life.” Before her accident, in “the rosy sunrise of [her] youth,” life would have seemed to be “fair in prospect,” with “many promises.” From the vantage point of her wheelchair, she would have felt that few of these promises had been kept (Schopenhauer 1974: 299). She would have thought about the

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prominent part suffering played in her life as an instance of “the infinite pain, which everywhere abounds in the world” (291). In addition to disappointment, she would have felt that her life was “a cheat” (299) – she was cheated of the normal pleasures humans experience, of walking and being with friends at will, of being both inside and outside daily, of family life and of having a wide array of acquaintances, of hopeful anticipation, all because she was condemned largely to a life of bedridden boredom. If she had thought like Schopenhauer, she would have found it unacceptable that “Jehovah created this world of misery and affliction” (301). She almost certainly would have felt resentment that such a divine person made her, and felt, too, that “it was better never to have been” (301). If the purpose of her life was not simply to undergo undiluted suffering, what could she say it was? Suffering was certainly an obstacle for Kristin’s pursuit of a worthwhile life, but it was not a permanent one. After she finished college, she obtained a master’s degree in social work and for a number of years worked as a social worker at an institution for troubled girls. From time to time, someone took her on “strolls” here and there. She kept in touch with acquaintances. She developed a faith in the Divine One. When I hike in the Colorado mountains above the tree line, I have sometimes gasped with astonishment at the stark and wondrous beauty that is so amazingly close. The awe I have felt when thinking about what Kristin has done with her life sometimes exceeds that awe. For Kristin and many others, suffering has prompted a fight for meaning. At the same time, there are undoubtedly many people for whom suffering from debilitating circumstances has been fatal, both for pursuing a meaningful life and literally for staying alive. So here, again, we meet divergence. Sometimes people do not pursue meaning because of their suffering, but sometimes they do. This divergence is a middle ground between the debilitating pessimism of some existential writers and the easy optimism one sometimes encounters in religious people. It is a realism that takes account of the frailty of human nature, its subterranean resistance to the good and the right, and its weakness in resisting obstacles to pursuing meaning. A true realism also takes account of the deep hunger for significance that human nature possesses and the fight to acquire meaning that humans sometimes engage in. “Realism” does not mean just “looking at the dark side of human nature,” as some have supposed. It means “looking at all aspects of human nature.” The result is a cautious and sometimes chancy hope that humans can find their way to true meaning, a despairing confidence,

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an uncertain assurance, that humans will seek to assuage their deep hunger for significance. This realism is appropriate when thinking of the enhancement thesis. When one believes that believing in the Divine One enhances the meaning of one’s life, one has an additional motive to pursue meaning. Will this additional motive always prompt those who believe in the Divine One to pursue meaning? One would like to think so. Those who believe in the Divine One may, indeed, be prompted to pursue meaning more because of this additional motive. Still, a realism about human nature dictates caution here as well. It may be that believing in the Divine One disarms some of the fiery power of the obstacles to pursuing meaning. But the sheer intensity of these obstacles forces one finally to be ambivalent again. The ideal sometimes becomes real and sometimes does not.

9 How Should We Live So as to Die Well?

To die is indeed the lot of every human being and thus is a very mediocre art, but to be able to die well is indeed the highest wisdom of life. (Soren Kierkegaard 1993a: 76) In my experience, people usually die the way they have lived. (A counselor, James Braley 2013: 296) A whole lifetime is needed to learn how to live, and – perhaps you’ll find this more surprising – a whole lifetime is needed to learn how to die. (Seneca 2018: xx)

During the first class period in Death and the Meaning of Life, a course I was teaching for the first time some years ago, the students and I were looking at the ways in which Ivan Ilyich, in Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, had not lived in the way he came to believe he should have lived. Near the end of that first class it occurred to me to ask how we should live so as to die well. I was calling on students, one by one, and Nicole was next. I said, “Nicole, how should we live so as to die well?” She was visibly startled, then silent for a good eight or ten seconds while I and the class waited quietly. She then said, hesitantly, “We need to value and appreciate the people and opportunities around us so that we don’t feel remorse at the end of our lives because we wasted what was given to us.” During the course of the semester, I asked everyone else in the class the same question, and everyone, except one, was startled and went through a similarly lengthy pause before answering.

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The answers were all different. Brady said, “We need to accept life as a gift and live by giving to others.” Malena said, “When presented with the opportunity to dance, we should take it.” James declared, “We should live without the anticipation of death, but with the knowledge that it will come.” Although their answers to the question differed, there are, I believe, some common answers that can be given. Our guide here will be Ivan Ilyich. By looking at the features of his life that led to his not confronting his imminent death well, we can determine what he would have to have done, and what his character would have to have been like, for him to have faced death well. I want to explain what Tolstoy’s story displays, that dying well requires living well. First, though, I want to point out that what I say about Ivan is not just a psychology of a male person. We can imagine much of Ivan’s character being true of a female. We can picture her craving the admiration of highsociety people, being afflicted with a slow death sentence, suffering moral agony at the thought that she had not lived right, and at the end screaming for three days before finally breaking through to the light. Although Ivan was in a profession that was considered in nineteenth-century Russia to be restricted to males – local magistrates – that should not prevent us who live in a later century from picturing a female judge who had the character traits that Ivan possessed. Ivanika Ilyich, to give our imagined female judge a name, no doubt would have had her culturally feminine ways of exhibiting these character traits. Though these would have differed from the culturally masculine ways in which Ivan exhibited them, both Ivan and Ivanika would have lived “not right” for the same reasons. I invite the reader to picture how these reasons would be exemplified in Ivanika as well as in Ivan. I also invite the reader to read The Death of Ivan Ilyich, as its depiction of dying is markedly vivid. Ivan Ilyich grew up in the mid-1800s in Saint Petersburg, a large Russian city. After going to law school he worked for five years as an assistant to the governor of a nearby province. When he was offered a position as a judge, an “examining magistrate,” in a different Russian province, he began a new life there. In one sense, though, it was not new, for he continued to associate with “highly placed people” at his new post and to act in ways he thought those people would approve. There he married, had two children, and acquired a butler and a butler’s helper named Gerasim. With time, Ivan had more and more difficulty in relating to his wife, Praskovya Fyodorovna Golovin, and he invested himself into his job a good deal more. There were dinners with his superiors and

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subordinates, after-dinner card games, and in general the full life of being a judge. Ivan and his family spent nearly twenty years there until he received an appointment back in Saint Petersburg, where he and his family then moved. Shortly afterward, Ivan started experiencing a strange taste in his mouth and mild pain on the left side of his stomach. The discomfort grew, and Ivan consulted physicians, who, unfortunately for Ivan, could not relieve his pain. Ivan did not want to admit that he might be dying, but that thought prompted him to wonder whether he had lived as he ought to have lived. The possibility that he had not haunted Ivan, especially when the pain got so bad that he had to stop working. Ivan became nearly helpless, relying on Gerasim to dress him and move him. Finally, after three days of excruciating physical pain and acute moral pain at the realization that his life had not been “right,” he died on February 4, 1882, at age forty-five. These are the bare facts of Ivan’s life. Tolstoy fills in these facts with numerous descriptions of Ivan’s inner life – the pride that motivated him, the character traits he had, the moral agony he experienced when he looked back at his life. The Death of Ivan Ilyich turns out to be a rich description of the psychology of encountering one’s own death, perhaps the best there is in a work of fiction. I shall explain this psychology, describing the main themes in it, interpreting them and supplementing them, beginning with the idea of dying well.

dying well Tolstoy indicates Ivan Ilyich’s conception of not dying well: “The doctor said that his physical sufferings were terrible, and that was true; but more terrible than his physical sufferings were his moral sufferings, and these were his chief torment” (Tolstoy 2009: 50). Ivan’s moral sufferings, Tolstoy continues, “consisted in the fact that, looking at Gerasim’s sleepy, good-natured, high-cheekboned face that night, it had suddenly occurred to him: And what if my whole life, my conscious life, has indeed been ‘not right’?” (50). What Ivan thought next lays bare this idea of being “not right”: “I am quitting this life with the consciousness that I have ruined everything that was given me” (50). Ivan has wrecked “his work, and his living conditions, and his family, and these social and professional interests” (50). In what Ivan did and in the character he exhibited at work and at home, he had deceived himself into thinking that his life was good. From time to time, though, Ivan had “barely noticeable impulses” telling him that the

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way he was living was not “the real thing” (50). But he immediately shoved these impulses away and continued with what he regarded as a good and pleasant life. These are moving words, and Tolstoy uses them to great effect. The philosophically minded reader, however, is liable to wonder what specific criteria Ivan had in mind when the thought occurred to him that he had ruined his life or that he had deceived himself about “the real thing.” Tolstoy does not have Ivan specify what they are. At the same time, Ivan seems to have hints of what the criteria are. The barely noticeable impulses that he had from time to time must surely have contained glimpses of how he should have been living. Moreover, we are told that after it occurred to Ivan that he may have ruined his life, he “lay on his back and started going over his whole life in a totally new way” (50). Ivan must have used new criteria to survey his life when he did this, criteria that told him how his life had been wrong. We can discover these new criteria by looking at the descriptions Tolstoy gives us of Ivan’s life. These criteria will become apparent as we proceed through the descriptions. One feature of the criteria needs to be mentioned now, though, as it tells us something supremely significant about human nature. I have already mentioned this feature. It is that the criteria are all moral. Ivan Ilyich’s paramount suffering was moral. This fact is indicative of what I shall call “the urgency of the moral” or “the primacy of the moral.” We humans are moral creatures – intensely moral creatures. And though this point may seem evident to anyone who inspects human nature, it is sometimes forgotten in the hurry and haste of life, or obscured somewhat intentionally, as seemed to be the case with Ivan. Yet it is of the highest significance. Its weight is illustrated dramatically by the fact that when Ivan finally came to the awful realization that his whole life may have been wrong and that everything he had lived by was a lie and a deception, he howled ceaselessly for three days. The end had come, the final end. And though he realized that his life had not been right, he had not come to terms with this terrible fact about himself. He thrashed about. He screamed so loudly that he could be heard nearly throughout the house. Ivan felt the urgency of the moral sharply, incisively, bitingly, acutely, and severely. Most of us, like Ivan, set aside this moral urgency for certain bits of our lives and simply follow our noses, the impulses that drive us through a day. This is the reason for pointing out the evident fact that humans are creatures for whom it is of paramount importance to pursue what is morally good and right and true. It is this paramount importance, and the

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human proclivity to set it aside, that prompted Socrates to say, in Plato’s literary and philosophical masterpiece, The Republic, “It is a great struggle, my dear Glaucon, greater than people think, to become good rather than bad” (Plato 2009: 312 [608b]). It is what prompted Soren Kierkegaard to comment that “[b]esides all its other good qualities, the good, the truly great and noble, has the quality of not allowing the observer to be indifferent. It elicits a pledge, as it were, from the person who has once caught a vision of it” (1990: 359). The primacy of the moral motivated the author of Deuteronomy, representing the Divine One, to declare, Let these words that I command you today be written on your heart. Teach them diligently to your children, and repeat them constantly – when you are at home, when you are walking down a road when you lie down at night and when you get up in the morning. Tie them on your head as a reminder; wear them as a circlet on your forehead; write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. (The Inclusive Bible 2007: Deuteronomy 6:6–9)

Living well is no trivial matter, nor is it easy. It involves a great struggle. Though the intrinsic nature of the good induces us to pledge ourselves to it, we constantly need to be reminded that there is such a thing as the good and right – when we first set our feet on the floor in the morning, as we walk from place to place during the day, and when we fall asleep at night. The moral demands that we not be indifferent to it. When Ivan Ilyich finally felt the urgency of the moral, he experienced it as a judgment, as a heavy hand that squashed him, as the unconquerable destruction that he was soon to undergo. But he also felt the primacy of the moral as freeing and liberating two hours before he died, when he discovered that his life could be rectified even though it had not been as it should have been. His moral pain left. His fear of death disappeared, and in its place there was light. His response to the light was joy. The way in which Ivan encountered his dying demonstrates dramatically that the moral plays a central role in both dying well and living well. We need to remind ourselves, though, that the moral does not play the only role, as I have said in earlier chapters. Nonmoral goods also play a substantial

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role. In what follows, though, I will focus on the moral, as that is what was prominent in Ivan Ilyich’s end-of-life anguish.

resistance When Ivan Ilyich saw that his life “was all a terrible vast deception concealing both life and death” (50), the reader is apt to focus on “death” and the fact that Ivan would someday die. But Ivan also evaded truths about his life. He evaded knowing that the motivation for much of what he did was to please those who were highly placed. He evaded knowing what was truly good. He did this especially when the barely noticeable impulses prompted him to become open to knowing these truths. He did not want to know what his motivations were. He did not want to know that his life was not right. These evasions are indicative of a deep-seated and pervasive moral resistance in him. This resistance originated in fear, it was connected to other parts of his character, and it became an entrenched habit, all of which made it extremely hard for Ivan to break through it. Fear: One of the fears that gave rise to Ivan’s resistance was the fear of discovering the wrongness in his inner life. Another of the fears almost certainly was what Ernest Becker calls the “fear of life.” Becker declares that humans have two major fears, not just one: “The human animal is characterized by two great fears that other animals are protected from: the fear of life and the fear of death” (Becker 1973: 53). The fear of life, Becker says, results in a “refusal of reality” (178). This refusal consists not only of resistance to countenancing the terrors of life but also resistance to what can be called the largeness of life. It is frightening to conceive of all the goodness, wonder, beauty, and virtue that life can be as a real possibility for oneself. It is frightening because one would have to give up significant features of one’s current life that one has become attached to. It is also frightening simply because a larger life feels as though it is too much to take in. This overwhelming character of the real possibility of adopting a new and wonderful life is what Becker is referring to when he says that humans “partialize the world” so as to prevent “free forward momentum, new choices, and growth” (178, 179). Partializing involves a “narrowing down” that “kills off so much of oneself” (181). Quoting Kierkegaard, Becker states that the one who partializes and narrows down tranquilizes oneself with the trivial (178). One numbs one’s sensitivity to goodness, wonder, beauty, and virtue by keeping one’s mind on small problems

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(178). We do this when we focus so much on the little things we rightly need to do that we eclipse visions of how we need to change. We obscure the numerous ways in which we could exemplify goodness because it is too much for us to contemplate. Becker contrasts this resistance and partializing with what he calls “the need to expand oneself” (203). There is, in other words, a duality in humans, Becker claims. One needs the largeness of the ideal moral life, yet resists it. This duality comes through in Tolstoy’s observation that Ivan Ilyich pushed aside the barely noticeable impulses that would have propelled him toward transformation if only he had listened to them. That Ivan had the impulses at all is indicative of the moral nature in him – it had not been entirely squashed by his “not right” life. It shows that at some level, perhaps largely subconscious, Ivan had an inkling of a right life, of a life that was larger and more open, with “free forward momentum” and “growth.” This first point about resistance is that its origin is partly a fear of an expanded and more open way of living. Connected: A second point is that although this resistance may at times seem as though it is a brute and bare “no” that is unlinked to anything else in us, it is in reality linked to a number of inner states. In Ivan it was linked to his wanting to be admired, to congratulating himself for being a proper and conscientious judge, and to burying himself in his judge activities. Ivan used these to resist self-knowledge. Because he liked being admired, he did not want to know that his being admired was really a way to feed his ego. Because he congratulated himself for being a proper and conscientious judge, he did not want to know that he was proper and conscientious solely to shore up his sense of worth. And burying himself in his judge activities served as a smoke screen to hide the hollowness of his life, the knowledge of which eventually surfaced near his death. These facts accord with the well-known truth that our inner states are connected in various ways and, moreover, that some of them are more central in the inner terrain than others. One’s self-conception, for instance, displays itself in numerous thoughts, emotions, and desires because it is a fairly central element of nearly everyone’s psychological makeup. Ivan’s self-conception displayed itself in the three states I mentioned previously: his liking being admired, his self-congratulation, and his busy and devoted judge activities. Ivan’s resistance to knowing his motivations and to knowing what his life could have been like was not a peripheral phenomenon, like the desire to eat a particular food for a day’s lunch. It was, rather, a phenomenon

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that was implicated in his major life activities. If it had been peripheral, he would not have gone through severe agony as he lay dying. He could easily have given it up. Because it was so central to his inner terrain, he realized, perhaps only vaguely, that giving up his resistance would have entailed making major changes in how he conceived of himself and in how he lived. This fact meant that giving up his resistance would have been almost impossible. Ivan’s last days dramatically exhibited this near impossibility. An Entrenched Habit: A third point about resistance is that it often becomes an entrenched habit. Thought patterns, desires, and actions that are a product of resistance become ingrained in the network of one’s inner life, so much so that other ways of thinking, desiring, and acting feel alien. This was true of Ivan Ilyich. When he shoved aside the barely noticeable impulses that presented a different way of living to him, he did so because of his entrenched habits of thinking, desiring, and acting. The impulses presented something so strange, perhaps even bizarre, that Ivan could not even entertain their possibility. This is what habits do – they feel so natural that other ways of living feel unnatural. They become like old friends from whom it is difficult to part. Augustine experienced this feature of resistance as he approached his conversion. He writes, “The nearer approached the moment of time when I would become different, the greater the horror of it struck me” (Augustine 1991: 151 [Bk. 8, Ch. 11]). It was not just sadness at parting with an old friend that Augustine felt, but acute fright. He continues, “Vain trifles and the triviality of the empty-headed, my old loves, held me back. They tugged at the garment of my flesh and whispered: ‘Are you getting rid of us?’ And ‘from this moment we shall never be with you again, not for ever and ever’” (151). Ivan, too, surely felt that he would lose something that he dearly loved when, near the end, he reviewed his life in a totally new way. How could he possibly give up what was so central a part of him, a part that involved his self-identity, which he had loved for so long? It is not too much to say that habits often involve an iron “necessity,” to use Augustine’s word. One is in bondage to them. With respect to the lust with which he wrestled, Augustine declares that “by servitude to passion, habit is formed, and habit to which there is no resistance becomes necessity. By these links, as it were, connected one to another (hence my term a chain), a harsh bondage held me under restraint” (140 [Bk. 8, Ch. 5]). Ivan, too, was in bondage. Otherwise, he would have embraced new ways of thinking quickly and easily.

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It is important to note that resistance is never total in any given person. People whose lives are governed by resistance still have at least a small measure of openness to change. I said earlier that Ivan’s pushing aside the barely noticeable impulses to become aware of his motives was indicative of a deep-seated moral resistance in him. But the mere fact that he had the impulses indicates that there is something in him that is the opposite of resistance, something that would have led to the expulsion of the resistance if he had listened to that something. With the possible exception of people who can be clinically labeled psychopathic, everyone has at least a small amount of openness to change in them. If this were not so, people could never change. But some resistant people do change. So the question about resistance and openness is which of these dominates a person’s character, which is exemplified in a person to a higher degree. In Ivan Ilyich, resistance dominated until the very end of his life, when, after an intense moral struggle, openness finally undid resistance. I shall describe this openness in the next section, relying on Tolstoy’s statements but also supplementing Tolstoy with interpretations and images.

the stance of openness Let us first picture Ivan as resistant. He is younger, without the threat of imminent death hanging over him. In the bodily pose that conveys his resistance, he is standing firm and erect, with a steely and hard facial expression that says, “Don’t get close to me.” His hands are in front of him, palms facing away from his body, as if to declare, “Stay away!” His feet are spread some, expressing solidity. He is not moved by anyone’s plight and does not let their emotions affect him. Though he is sometimes inclined in the courtroom to give a miscreant a lighter sentence than he otherwise would, this is due solely to the impression he knows he is making on his fellow judges and the public, both of whose admiration he covets. In this stance of resistance, Ivan insulates himself from the emotional lives of his acquaintances, colleagues, friends, and even his spouse and children. It is as though he is unaware that they exist. He does, obviously, know that other people exist, for this stance of resistance, palms facing away from him, presupposes that there are other people. But there is a sense in which it is a great discovery to recognize that other people exist. Ivan has not made this discovery because he wants only to use others to shore up his own self-image. He wants people to give him high approval for acumen as a judge. He

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does not want them to get close to him in a way that requires him to be open and welcoming to them – open and welcoming in more than the merely formal and pseudo-manner that defines him as an external person. This externality is at the heart of his resistance. Ivan’s stance of resistance is directed not only toward others but also toward himself – to self-knowledge and awareness that his life can be different. The stance says, “Stay away from me, self-knowledge. I do not want you to get close to me. Stay away, new possibilities. I do not want to know about you or adopt you.” His stance of resistance is indicative of an underlying fear of what would happen if he were to acquire selfknowledge and countenance new possibilities. Ivan’s stance of resistance affects every component of his daily life – the way he conducts himself toward his family and colleagues and the way he regards those whom he considers friends. He does not adopt the stance only on selected occasions and in private, but often and in public. He holds a hand up, palm facing away, as he walks the hallways of his workplace, as he engages in conversations, even when he is alone. It is a rare individual, however, who catches Ivan in his stance of resistance, even when he adopts it in plain sight, which he frequently does, for nearly all of Ivan’s friends also adopt such a stance. And doing so blinds them to Ivan’s resistance. Ivan is also blinded by his stance, most of the time, at least. Only occasionally does he catch a brief half-glimpse of his resistance. This halfglimpse is a somewhat hazy awareness in which Ivan is not fully aware of the resistance, but not fully unaware, either. He quickly smothers this hazy awareness, lest it become fully conscious. An all-knowing observer would notice Ivan’s resistance to knowing his resistance and would regard it as a central and controlling characteristic of Ivan. Ivan’s stance of resistance is directed also to the Divine One. Let us picture Ivan meeting the Divine One while he is out walking. At first Ivan does not recognize her, but something about her demeanor strikes Ivan as unusual. She possesses a calmness that Ivan has never seen in a human. Her eyes look straight at Ivan with a preternatural kindness, yet with a penetrating gaze, as though she can read Ivan’s innermost thoughts. Ivan notices these characteristics despite being blinded by his resistance. At once fear overcomes him, and his hands go up, his steely glance spreads across his face, he stops and holds his ground. He does not want this chance meeting to turn into an encounter in which he is compelled to acknowledge what he is really doing with his life. He does not want to have to change. The Divine One sees Ivan’s hands holding her at bay,

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perceives the fear behind the steely glance, and observes his desire not to be known by her. She passes by. Now let us imagine a transformed Ivan. He was diagnosed with a fatal disease, but recovers. The doctors explain this by saying that they had misdiagnosed Ivan’s condition. Ivan thinks of it as a miraculous turnaround. Whatever the cause of his recovery, the initial diagnosis scares Ivan into evaluating his life. He asks himself, “Have I been who I really want to be?” He becomes painfully aware that he has not been. He does not scream or writhe in agony, but goes through a laborious and emotional process before he can adopt a stance of openness. In this stance, he has his hands in front of him again, but instead of his palms facing away from him, they are facing up. His forearms are perpendicular to his body, so that his hands are about waist high, instead of being shoulder high, as in the stance of resistance. Both his hands and his face, with its expression of welcome, convey warm and glad reception. His eyes are especially welcoming – the lines at their corners are the result of a smile that is sometimes large and sometimes barely perceptible but always unmistakably kind. Ivan is glad to see whomever he meets. In this second stance, Ivan opens himself to others instead of insulating himself from them. He is aware that they exist in the sense in which it is a great discovery to notice that other people exist, for Ivan no longer simply uses people to prop up his self-image. His aim in life is no longer to secure admiration and high approval from his peers. The lighter sentences he sometimes gives as a judge come from genuine sympathy and not the craving to appear sympathetic. He is living his own life, unlike the external person he once was, one who was merely impersonating himself. And in living his own life, he genuinely welcomes others instead of simply appearing to do so. Ivan’s stance of openness is also directed toward himself. He has little fear of what he will find when he examines his motives for what he does because he wants to know whether they are good and right. He wants to excise ego-expanding, ulterior motives. He does not want to have a constricted life that resists new possibilities. So he welcomes knowing about new virtues he can exemplify and new ways he can work out those virtues. His newfound willingness to turn his attention inward comes from the fact that he is able to accept himself despite discovering that his motives have not been right or that he has not embodied the right virtues or that he has not been living his own life. The resistant Ivan could not accept himself. But with the open and welcoming stance he now embodies, he can accept himself, and when needed, forgive himself.

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The transformed Ivan does not perfectly possess this stance of openness. He wrestles with the resistance that once governed him. Spasms of fear attack him from time to time. He wants to retreat into himself on occasion. He is tempted merely to use people for his own ends. In spite of these departures from perfect openness, the stance of openness is a prominent part of his daily life. He assumes the stance when he encounters people with whom he works, when he talks with people one-on-one, sometimes even as he sits quietly in his study. On occasions when he is not publicly assuming the stance, he imagines himself assuming it. Though no one notices when Ivan is imagining himself in the stance of openness, many do notice when he publicly adopts the stance, especially those who also adopt it. For openness has the distinctive characteristic of removing blinders from one’s moral perceiving capability. That is, with openness one more readily observes the moral features of people and situations. One who has this openness is more likely to observe that someone is empathetic or gracious in her interactions with people, or that a troublesome situation is fraught with pain for those who are in it.1 So it is that the people Ivan encounters who themselves possess a high degree of openness observe it in him. The transformed Ivan, too, observes it in himself. Interestingly, some people with a fair amount of resistance perceive Ivan’s new openness. This is due to the fact that the small amount of openness that resistant people possess allows them to perceive openness in others. There are complexities here that make it difficult to determine whether someone will notice another person’s openness. In any case, many people do notice it in Ivan. Our imagined change in Ivan from resistance to openness eventually produces a habit. But unlike the entrenched habit of resistance that had him in an iron grip, openness is a voluntary habit. He chooses to keep the habit. It is more like a daily habit of taking a walk than it is like a daily habit of consuming addictive drugs. Both habits are captivating, but in different ways – the one attracts with delight and spontaneous gladness; the other drives and pushes without one’s consent. In the one, there is a high degree of control; in the other, there is a low degree of control. Ivan can adopt his stance of openness in religious ways as well. We can picture him in a holy place, perhaps looking up, with his hands extended in front of him, facing up, as if to say, “Yes, Divine One, I am open to knowing all that you see in me – my motives, my desires – and to knowing your instruction in how I should live.” When he meets the Divine One while out walking, he instantly extends his hands with delight and happiness. The Divine One stops, and the two converse for a bit before each moves on.

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When Ivan “lay on his back and started going over his life in a totally new way,” discovering that “it was all a terrible, vast deception” (50), he finally recognized that he had not been aware. He had not known that he was living in deception, that his motives for adopting an overbearing, courtly demeanor were self-aggrandizing, that there were virtues that he had not prioritized or even valued. He had not been aware of these because he had not been open to being aware of them. He had held his hands up, palms away, in a stance of resistance to them. When, finally, that stance crumbled three days before his death just enough for him to realize that his life had not been “right,” he howled for those three days in agony at that revelation. Hours before his death, the stance of resistance disintegrated further, enough this time for him to grasp the fact that he could change. Suddenly he became open to that, and though he was too weak physically to adopt the bodily stance of openness, he had enough of it in him that he could ask his wife and son to forgive him. The moral agony he had been experiencing disappeared, and so did the fear of death. For the last two hours of his life he felt surpassing joy at having discovered that “there was no more death” and that instead of death there was light (53). Ivan had at the very last moment, almost before it was too late, learned how he should have lived so as to die well.

character traits The character traits that are pertinent to dying well can be discovered by looking at the traits that produced Ivan Ilyich’s agony as he faced death. Although Tolstoy clearly depicts these traits, he does not spell out exactly how Ivan finally came to regard them as “not right.” I shall suggest some of the missing thoughts Ivan could have had, then sketch how a transformed Ivan might have faced death. The Power to Crush Ivan liked to think of himself as having the “power to crush” those who appeared before him in court (Tolstoy 2009: 11): “Everyone was in his hands, and he needed only to write certain words on paper with a letterhead, and this important self-satisfied man would be brought to him as an accused person or a witness, and, if he was not of a mind to let him sit down, the man would stand before him and answer his questions” (11–12). Although Ivan never misused this power (which no doubt gave him a prideful self-satisfaction), “for him the consciousness of this power

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and the possibility of softening it constituted the main interest and attraction of his new work” (12). Making fair and impartial decisions was not the chief appeal of being a judge. It was, rather, the superiority Ivan felt to the people with whom he dealt. In the stance of superiority that Ivan took toward these people, he is seated at a large, ornate desk in a room with walls made of well-crafted, dark wood. The desk is elevated above the floor about three-quarters of a foot, so that, to those brought before Ivan, it feels as though Ivan is very important. He is not to be crossed. Ivan is dressed in a full, black robe, giving him an air of unquestioned control. As the accused are brought before the desk, Ivan imagines himself standing and pointing at them. His extended arm and index finger follow the accused until they reach the front of the desk. This posture says, “I have the authority to decide your fate today. You need to recognize that and not say anything that will provoke me to use this authority in a way that you will not like. I am totally in charge.” Then Ivan sits. The accused often feel the attitude of superiority by what his face and bodily comportment convey. When Ivan reviewed his life in a totally new way, he may have sensed that the attitude he had toward those he encountered in his position as a magistrate was what Immanuel Kant called treating people “simply as a means” (Kant 1964: 96). The distinction Kant made was between treating people only as a means to one’s own ends and treating them as ends in themselves. In different words, this distinction was between “using” people and respecting them for their intrinsic worth. When we use people, we try to get something from them, and that is the only value they have for us. There are, of course, good things we get from others, such as companionship or cooperation in jointly achieving some goal. But for Kant the goodness or badness of what we get from using people makes no difference to the goodness or badness of using them – it is wrong merely to use others no matter what the goal is. Kant recognized, though, that we can treat people as means to an end and respect them for their intrinsic worth. This combination occurs quite often, such as in good friendships, marriages, and sales transactions. If, however, respect for the intrinsic worth of the other in a friendship, marriage, or sales transaction were not present, these would be cases simply of using someone to get something from them. This is how Ivan thought of those who approached his ornate desk. His only attitude toward them was to use them. There was no respect for their intrinsic worth. Now let us combine these thoughts with the Golden Rule: do to others as you would have them do to you (the positive version) and do not do to

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others as you would not have them do to you (the negative version). As Ivan is going over his life in a new way, he imagines a role reversal – he is the accused approaching a judge. He asks himself, “Would I want someone to think of me just as a tool for them to build up their ego, only as someone over whom they can exercise control? Would I even like someone whose sole delight in being a judge is to have the power to crush me if they so chose?” These rhetorical questions contain this reasoning: if I, Ivan, would not want other people to think of me only as a tool for their ends, then I should not treat people only as tools for my ends. In asking himself these questions and reasoning in this way, Ivan is doing several things that are different from what he did when he was entrenched in his habit of resistance. He is exercising moral imagination, he is employing a significant moral distinction, and he is using a significant moral rule. These explain why Ivan Ilyich felt so much agony as he lay dying. The Kantian moral distinction and the Golden Rule now came to be felt by him to be supremely important. And his not having felt them to be important before makes him feel that his earlier life was all wrong. Misplaced Joys Tolstoy tells us what Ivan Ilyich liked most about living. Ivan’s “real pleasure was in little dinners to which he invited ladies and gentlemen of social position” (21). His “official joys were the joys of self-esteem; the social joys were the joys of vainglory; but Ivan’s real joys were joys of playing vint” (a Russian card game) (21). The people with whom Ivan played vint were undoubtedly esteemed by Ivan for their social standing – they were “highly placed” (9, 11) and of “the best sort” (21). These joys contrast with those of the young peasant, Gerasim, who helped Ivan get off the couch and held his legs up while Ivan lay on the couch, sometimes all night. Gerasim is depicted as “always cheerful, bright” (35) and as “obviously restraining the joy of life shining on his face” (35). This joy of life certainly did not involve reputation and status and looking good in the eyes of highly placed people, as it did for Ivan. Gerasim seems simply to love being alive. He delights in taking care of Ivan. He is happy doing daily chores. Above all, Gerasim understands Ivan and makes it plain that he knows that Ivan is dying (38). Ivan may have had Gerasim in mind when, two or three weeks before he died, Ivan “started to go over in his imagination the best moments of his pleasant life” (46). A strange thing happened as he did this: “All those best moments seemed now not at all as they had seemed then” (46). As he

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progressed in his imagination from childhood to adulthood, he found that “the further from childhood, the closer to the present, the more worthless and dubious were those joys” (46). What seemed at the time to have been joys now “melted away and turned into something worthless and often vile” (46), unlike the pure and simple joys of Gerasim. To understand what Ivan may have been feeling, we can turn to Aristotle. In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle states, “No one would call a person just if he did not enjoy acting justly, or generous if he did not enjoy generous actions, and the same goes for the other virtues” (Aristotle 2014: 14 [1099a18–20]). Aristotle is saying that if someone is just, they will delight in doing just actions, that if someone is generous, they will take pleasure in doing generous things, and generally that if someone is virtuous in some particular way, they will find joy in exercising that virtue. This means that if someone does not enjoy exercising a specific virtue, they do not possess that virtue. This is so, Aristotle says, because virtuous activity “contains its pleasure in itself” (14 [1099a17]). What he means by this is that virtuous activity does not need pleasure to be added to it to make it attractive. Virtuous activity is unlike things that do need something to be added to them to make them attractive, such as Christmas trees to which we add ornaments. The attractiveness of virtuous activity is inherent in it. This is why, Aristotle says, we find virtuous activity enjoyable. Ivan did not find certain virtues enjoyable. There were, in fact, a number of virtues that he did not find enjoyable. Because he liked thinking of himself as having the power to crush people who appeared before him in court, he did not take pleasure in exercising compassion or generosity. Because he loved vainglory, he did not enjoy listening graciously to peasants, as there would have been little to enhance his reputation by doing so. He could, of course, have appeared to be compassionate, generous, and gracious, but he would not have possessed these as genuine virtues. This realization is what produced agony in Ivan as he surveyed the joys of his life. The fact that he did not enjoy exemplifying certain virtues showed him that he did not possess those virtues. And without those virtues, he felt that his life was meaningless and wasted. Excessive Self-Regard Ivan’s focus on himself ran through his resistance to being open, permeated his sense of having the power to crush people, and lay behind his misplaced joys. His resistance to being open came from a disproportionate desire to preserve himself from the fear of life and the fear of death. His

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sense of having the power to crush others came from an exalted estimation of his significance. And his misplaced joys came from a desire for an enhanced reputation and admiration. This excessive self-regard is exhibited in what can be called egocentric service of the good (see Kierkegaard 1993b: 60–4; 1956: 99–103). In this, one does good things for the sake of self-congratulation. It is not the goodness of actions that prompts one to do them, but the acclaim and applause one gives oneself. “I am compassionate,” one says, with an air of pride. But there is no compassion if self-congratulation is the only motive of a compassionate-appearing action, Kierkegaard maintains. Compassion, as with all virtues, requires the right motive to count as compassion. (This is a central claim of virtue ethics.) Excessive self-regard is also exhibited in the vainglory in which Ivan found pleasure. In the Christian tradition, vainglory was on the original list of seven deadly sins. Its main feature is seeking inordinate attention.2 This seeking can be done boastfully, flaunting one’s successes and making a public display of even one’s everyday activities. Or it can be done without obvious flaunting by engaging in ordinary tasks with an inordinate desire that others cheer and clap for what one does. The second of these seemed to be Ivan’s main mode. He was not often visibly ostentatious, but the desire for admiration for what he did was principally what drove him. Both of these – the egocentric service of the good and vainglory – prevented Ivan from transcending himself. Transcending oneself requires seeking the good of others solely because it is good and not because of the admiration one hopes to get from those others, and also not because of the self-congratulation one expects to give oneself. It requires praising someone for an accomplishment without having these ulterior motives. Transcending oneself toward the Divine One involves loving and revering the Divine One, which require focusing attention on the Divine One solely because of the character of the Divine One. This cannot be done if one’s central driving forces are egocentric service of the good and vainglory. When, at the end of his life, Ivan finally realized that his life had been only about himself, he felt keen remorse. He did so because he now felt acutely that his life should have contained moments of self-transcendence, moments in which he moved beyond himself solely for the sake of goodness. Ivan’s experience illustrates two basic moral drives in human nature – the need to take care of oneself and the need to transcend oneself. The first drove Ivan until near his death, albeit falsely, and the second was awakened in him as he approached death. His moral agony arose because he

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felt, for the first time, that he had botched the first need and had never fulfilled the second. It was not too late, though, for Ivan to step beyond himself. He engaged in a definite act of self-transcendence when, two hours before he died, he asked Praskovya to forgive him. This act presupposed that Ivan had become aware of Praskovya’s distressing feelings about what was happening to her husband, had regarded those feelings with respect and concern, and had acquired a desire to say something that would help her deal with those feelings. His aim was to deliver her from her sufferings (53). Immediately after this act of selflessness, “it suddenly became clear to him that what was tormenting him and would not be resolved was suddenly all resolved at once, on two sides, on ten sides, on all sides” (53). The transformation from excessive self-regard to self-transcendence relieved Ivan of his moral agony. “‘And the pain?’ he asked himself. ‘What’s become of it? Where are you, pain?’ . . . He sought his old habitual fear of death and could not find it” (53). Ivan’s excessive self-regard was replaced with a mixture of legitimate self-regard and genuine selftranscendence.

a conversation with ivan on dying well Let us imagine a transformed Ivan Ilyich dying of old age. As a result of a death scare he had several decades earlier and a subsequent transformation, he thought of death from time to time. Now, though, he is in hospice, and he knows that his death is near, months away he hopes, but more likely only weeks. He has been confined to bed most of the time, but occasionally is able to sit in a chair next to his bed in the long-term nursing care facility where he has been for some weeks. Praskovya and his daughter and son have visited him frequently. They know he does not have long to live, and they know Ivan knows as well, for he has spoken with them about his affairs once he is gone. On a sunny afternoon, a friend arrives, unannounced, while Ivan is sitting in his chair gazing out the nearby window. They talk for a bit, then the friend, who is not shy about asking sensitive and straightforward questions, asks, “What is it like to know that you are going to die soon?” Ivan nods his head slowly and says in an unhurried but solid voice, “Thanks for asking. I think I would have been offended by that question thirty years ago when the doctors thought I was going to die, not because it is too personal, but because I don’t think I could have pictured myself dead then. I thought that only other people died. It couldn’t happen to me,

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I believed, even though the plain truth was that, before the miraculous turn around, I was headed for death.” Ivan’s friend nods her head. “I think, too,” Ivan continues, “that I would have been offended because I wasn’t ready to die and didn’t want even so much as to hear the word ‘death.’ I wasn’t ready to die because of who I was then.” “Who were you then?” the friend asks. “I went through a good deal of agony – moral agony – before I could finally be honest with myself. I didn’t want to believe that I was pretty much full of myself, wanting everyone to admire me, doing things only for that admiration, and craving constant attention from my fellow magistrates. When I came to realize that these were the only reasons I liked being a magistrate, I was troubled at first, then broken and crushed, because I thought I had been living a good and noble and truly morally blameless life. In reality, I was living only for myself. Something in me said, more and more loudly, that that was not the way to live.” Ivan paused. His friend waited. “I discovered, too, that I liked all the wrong things. I liked thinking of myself as someone who could destroy those who stood before me in the courtroom. I liked associating with people in the highest class of society. I wanted to be with them and have them like me. I discovered that, in this, I wasn’t really being myself, I wasn’t living my own life. I was in reality living my idea of how I thought a high society person would live. I was just pretending to be myself. “Only rarely did I get intimations of what I was doing and what I should really be. I squashed those intimations, because I didn’t want to be aware of the truth about myself and didn’t want to know how I should be living. I also did not want to have anything to do with the Divine One. I thought that I would have to be honest with myself if I did, and that was something I desperately did not want to do. I went to occasional services at the Russian Orthodox Church, but that was just to keep up appearances.” “What changed you?” Ivan’s friend asked. “It was all these discoveries along with a tug of the heart that I couldn’t resist.” “A tug of the heart?” “I wanted to live without the thought that my whole life was false. I wanted to be able to die without remorse for having wasted my life. These desires gradually took hold of me until I could no longer drive them away. One evening as I was walking home from a day at court, I could

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bear the tension no longer. Part of myself was battling to hang on to all the falsehood of my life up until then, and part of myself was pushing me, or pulling me, to cast it all out and become entirely new. I stopped, dropped my briefcase to the ground, and stood, alone and breathing deeply, while the two desires fought. My old life flashed before me, and the prospect of a new life presented itself. I could almost visibly see the wonder and beauty of that new life. I put my hands out in front of me, palms up, and said, actually more felt than voiced, ‘I give up all that falsehood. I am sorry for it. From now on, I am new.’ I said this to myself, but it felt vaguely as though I was also saying it to the Divine One.” “How did you change?” “I don’t want to be in a position of boasting about myself. But I can fairly say that I gave up my self-centeredness, most of it, at any rate, and became something of a person for others. I no longer thought of those I examined in court as inferiors whom I could crush, but as people needing help in making a life for themselves. I started associating with peasants when I could and listened to them without feeling that I had lowered myself. I gave up wanting to emulate and impress high society people. I felt more connected to my acquaintances emotionally, including Praskovya and our children, instead of feeling isolated and separate. I delighted when something good happened to those I knew. I began to appreciate the value of love. It felt as though I was being genuine instead of fake. I revered the Divine One, sometimes alone and sometimes in public gatherings. “I don’t want to pretend that these are perfected. So I find myself having to give myself mercy, and hoping the Divine One does as well.” “I am moved by what you have said.” “Thanks for listening.” “One last question. How do the changes in your life affect how you are facing death?” “I was coming to that. I think I can say that I am at peace about my impending death. I don’t deny that I am sad at having to die – I have lots more I want to do. And sometimes I feel flashes of fear and dread. But in my calmer moments I am happy and content. I have loved my life. I have lived well, at least for the last several decades. I am ready to go over the book of my life with the Divine One, page by page, requesting mercy for the tainted pages and valuing those pages on which the true, the good, and the just are depicted. “If you were to ask what the connection between living well and dying well is, I would respond with the thought that we humans are meant to live well. That is our nature, given to us by the Divine One. If we get to the end

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of our lives without having lived well, then we haven’t done what we were meant to do. We would not die with the satisfaction of knowing that we had done what we were meant to do. Dying well requires having that satisfaction.” Ivan’s friend nods. I will leave the real Ivan and Ivanika now. Their lives have portrayed, albeit negatively, how one should live so as to die well. They have also portrayed two thoughts. The first is that one has not lived well until one faces the reality of one’s death. Though this assertion may not be true for some people, it certainly is true for others. These others need a jolt to awaken them to questions of meaning. They may have done the tasks they took on or that were assigned to them without thinking about their meaning. Or, more strongly, they may have resisted thinking about meaning because it felt too frightful to do so. For them, only the prospect of their own death can serve as a call from eternity. The second thought is that the way in which one faces death reveals how one has lived. An astute observer can determine how someone has lived by watching how they die. The character traits and prominent desires one has had prior to the approach of death typically remain the same as one gets closer to death. As a result, how one dies is something of a test of how one has lived. Unfortunately, one does not get to take the test twice so as to improve one’s score. In response to this fact, Kierkegaard might declare, “It is the eleventh hour!” (1993b: 14–16; 1956: 40–2). This declaration does not mean that one constantly has to be aware of one’s death. That would be debilitating. But it does mean that one should not succumb to the habit of resisting so that one puts off thinking about meaning until it is almost too late.

epilogue Facts the Heart Can Feel

This book has been a sustained invitation to care about meaning. The first chapter dealt with such caring explicitly – wanting to please the Divine One, who has created humans with a desire to exemplify intrinsic goods, prompts one to care about meaning. Three chapters described conditions that caring about meaning address – existential boredom, fear of death, and finding an answer to the question, “Why do I keep living?” The enhancement thesis – that believing in a loving creator and in life beyond death can enhance one’s life significantly – invites one to consider how one’s life can become more meaningful. The last chapter described some ways how one could live so as to die well, ways whose attractiveness can move one to care about them. It is appropriate now to make explicit what has been implicit throughout all this, namely, that living a meaningful life can be a great delight. This delight is a response to the ways in which we acquire meaning. Albert Camus’s famous statement, in reference to whether life is worth living, is pertinent here: “These are facts the heart can feel” (Camus 1983: 3). The facts in the present case are that we experience numerous moral and nonmoral goods. We spend time with friends, display empathy and compassion, smell flowers, gaze at magnificent vistas, play noncompetitively, become aware of the accomplishments of others, revere the Divine One, write beautiful letters to our friends – the list is as long as a lifetime. As obvious as it may be, it is worth stating that one of the most important responses we can have toward these facts is to feel delight in them. And, equally obvious yet also worth stating, this delight can prompt us to care about meaning more strongly. I think of Malena, who took random walks with no destination. The fact that she relished such walks inspired her to take more of them (see her

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“A Phenomenology of Walking” on YouTube). I think, too, of Dale, a medicinal chemist for neglected diseases at a pharmaceutical company, who was instrumental in formulating medicine that would save the lives of HIV/AIDS-afflicted people. The fact that he was excited to be involved in the project to formulate the medicine prompted him to become involved in other such projects. In each case, Malena’s and Dale’s delight at engaging in a meaningful activity induced them to keep engaging in it. Honesty and realism, unfortunately, impel us to say that the principle embodied in Camus’s statement also applies to the other side of the troubling paradox with which this book began: we want meaningful lives yet also initiate obstacles to the satisfaction of that desire. We want our everyday activities to count for something yet let inner dividedness or indifference undercut the pursuit of those activities. These, too, are facts the heart can feel. But it is dismay and consternation, tinged with dejection, that is a proper response to these facts, not delight. It would be a source of dismay if we were to become aware of having drifted through our years without paying attention to the meaningfulness of what we were doing. It would be a source of paralyzing consternation if we were to realize near the end of our lives that we had wasted them by pursuing unworthy goals or by being emotionally numb to intrinsic goods. One way to respond to this dismay and consternation and dejection is to let them cripple delight so that its motivating ability is undone. A better way – the right way – is to regard these emotions as calls from eternity, calls to reject their crippling power and embrace the motivating power of delight. In this way, caring about meaning would become a prominent part of our lives. We would say, with Arthur Jarvis in Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country, “I am no longer able to aspire to the highest with one part of myself, and to deny it with another. I do not wish to live like that. I would rather die than live like that” (Paton 1976: 208).

Notes

why should we care about meaning? 1. Throughout the book I will be quoting from the 1993b Hong and Hong translation of Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing, pp. 3–154, called An Occasional Discourse in that translation, and also citing the page numbers in the 1956 Douglas Steere translation, as the Steere translation is still in common use. On occasion, I will quote from both translations. 2. See Tessman 2005 for an extended treatment from a feminist perspective of the difficulties involved in being virtuous in constricting circumstances. 3. For a discussion of the role of moral and nonmoral goods in a well-lived life, see Wolf 1982 and Adams 1984. Some of the instances of nonmoral goods they give are artistic, physical, and intellectual achievements, such as painting and dancing well. 4. See also Kant 2015: 96, where Kant states, “Inclination is blind and servile, whether it is kindly or not.” 5. See Blum 1987: 233–5 for a defense of this.

denial of death 1. For an assessment of Becker’s view of vital lies, see Martin 1986: Chapter 6, “Vital Lies,” 109–37. 2. Those wondering whether there is any empirical evidence supporting the claim that the fear of death has a pervasive role in human activity can consult Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski 2015. Written by three psychologists, this book contains numerous accounts of double-blind, controlled experiments substantiating the claim that the fear of death is prominent in the lives of the subjects in the experiments.

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acquiring meaning 1. It is difficult to incorporate psychopaths into these thoughts about meaning and emotion. See Hare 1993 for an experimentally based discussion of psychopaths. 2. Goodenough does not mention the incessant violence that fuels evolution, which may undermine her claim about the sacredness of life and reverence toward that sacredness. I will set this issue aside so as to focus on her view of meaning. 3. The findings of two Pew Research Center surveys support this first attractive feature. The answers to the question, “What makes your life feel meaningful, fulfilling, or satisfying?” are quantified in an article titled, “Where Americans Find Meaning in Life,” at www.pewforum.org/2018/11/20/where-americansfind-meaning-in-life/. A hundred of the written responses are given in an article titled, “What Keeps Us Going?” at www.pewforum.org/interactives/whatkeeps-us-going/. 4. Pychopaths may be an exception.

suicide 1. “Penny” is not her real name. I have also given pseudonyms to the other suicidal people I refer to in this chapter. Penny’s account is based on an interview I had with her for Choosing to Live: Stories of Those Who Stepped Away from Suicide (Williams 2017: 47–57).

the divine one 1. “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe: . . . the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me” (Kant 1956: 166). A newer translation, however, translates the German Ehrfurcht as “reverence” instead of “awe” (Kant 2015: 129).

life after death 1. In this passage from Summa Contra Gentiles, Aquinas does not distinguish between contemplation of truth and contemplation of the Divine One. Elsewhere, though, he makes it clear that the Divine One is the object of contemplation, including in the passage from Summa Theologica quoted earlier.

obstacles 1. For a discussion of the effects of attributing an impaired will to black Americans see Tessman 2005: ch. 2, “The Damage of Moral Damage,”

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33–52. I intend what I say about black Americans and women to be compatible with both conservative and liberal political stances. 2. See Third Section, “On the Difference between the Sublime and the Beautiful in the Contrast between the Two Sexes,” in “Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime” in Kant 2011: 39, and Fourth Section, “On the National Characters in So Far As They Rest upon the Different Feeling of the Sublime and the Beautiful,” in Kant 2011: 58–9.

how should we live so as to die well? 1. This statement needs considerable expansion and support, more than can be given here. Ralph Waldo Emerson expressed a similar idea: “To the dull mind all nature is leaden. To the illuminated mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light.” Quoted in Smith 2017: 146 from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes, eds., Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson with Annotations: 1824–1832 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1909), 381. Kierkegaard, too, expresses something like the idea in his statement, quoted earlier, “When evil lies in the heart, the eye sees offense, but when purity lives in the heart, the eye sees the finger of God” (1990: 60). Emerson’s illuminated mind and Kierkegaard’s pure heart are akin to Ivan’s stance of openness with its enhanced ability to observe moral features of people and situations. 2. Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung defines vainglory as “the excessive and disordered desire for recognition and approval from others” (DeYoung 2009: 60).

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Index

Aaron, 94 Adams, Robert M., 148 Alan, 86 Anne, 89 Aquinas, 76, 106, 125, 126 Aristotle, 27, 70, 146, 168 assumptions, 1–3, 97–9, 112 atelic goods, 63, 68 Augustine, 15, 125, 143, 145, 160 bad faith, 35 Baggini, Julian, 5, 99, 101, 105 Baier, Annette, 71 Baldwin, James, 147 Becker, Ernest, 42–51, 52–3, 105, 142, 158 black Americans, 147 Blob, 114, 121 boredom, 61–6 as a call from eternity, 39–41 concerned about, 32 and the Divine One, 34 everyday, 30 existential, 31, 107–8, 123 like being dead, 34 as an objection to life after death, 124 as a religious reality, 34 terror toward, 32 unconcerned about, 32 Brady, 154 Brison, Susan J., 4 brute “no,” 144, 159 Buber, Martin, 70

Camus, Albert, 4, 37, 41, 58, 82, 96, 100, 120, 174 care, ethics of, 71–3 caring about meaning, 90, 174 as a duty, 22–4 as producing happiness, 24–5 as a virtue, 26–9 context principle, 99, 113 Cottingham, John, 22, 130, 131 counting fireflies, 15 Cristyn, 119, 123 Dale, 175 dancing well, 35 death fear of, 43 fighting fear of, 44–7 my own, 47 desires, 23, 64 despair, 37, 93 moral or religious, 88 distress, 32, 37, 108, 130 dividedness, 12, 115, 121–3, 143–6 counteracting, 122 Divine One, 1, 19–20, 21, 60, 67, 69, 73 believing in, 98 and caring about meaning, 19, 22 direct perception of after death, 125 and duty, 24 and existential boredom, 34 and happiness, 24 hiding from, 36

186

Index and indifference, 34 knowing that one matters to, 106 rebellion directed toward, 38 and virtues, 25 Douglass, Frederick, 150 dread, 36 Eagleton, Terry, 71 emotional hermit, 60, 67, 71 emotions, 56–8, 59, 61, 67, 68–70, 71, 91, 107 enhancement thesis, 3, 97, 98 compared to tastes, 103 postdeath, 112, 116, 117, 131 Epicurus, 129 Ethan, 88 Eva, 94 evasive tactics against the pain of boredom, 34–6 as a religious reality, 36 Eve and Adam, 36 existential harm of death with extinction, 129, 131 existential move, 108–11, 130 intergalactic travel objection to, 110 families, 71 fat relentless ego, 122, 138 fear of life, 158 feminism, 71–3 final tally, 43, 116, 130 Fischer, John Martin, 126 free spirit, 136, 138 friendship, 14, 16, 71, 166 Froese, Paul, 148 Gerasim, 155, 167 Golden Rule, 166 Goodenough, Ursula, 68 gratitude, 28, 68, 102 Harvey, 89 Held, Virginia, 71 heroism, 44 Hick, John, 131 hope, 91, 93, 119, 123, 146, 149, 151 objection to, 119, 120 without belief in life after death, 120 humility, 52, 54 illusion, 47, 48, 62, 137, 143 immortality projects, 42, 44–6

187

one-dimensional, 46 as religious, 53 indifference, 10–12, 31–2 baffled by, 16, 18 explanations of, 16–19 ultimate, 32, 34 intrinsic goods, 3, 15, 19, 41, 65 desires for, 13–15, 52 irrelevancy objection, 99 Ivan Ilyich, 47, 100, 154 character traits of, 165–70 his encounter with the Divine One, 162, 164 his stance of openness, 163 his stance of resistance, 161, 165 his stance of superiority, 166 imagined conversation with, 170–3 imagined transformation of, 163–4 Ivanika Ilyich, 154 James, 154 Jeni, 11 joy, 102, 168 Kant, Immanuel, 22, 23, 57, 103, 148, 166 Kierkegaard, Soren, 17, 36, 39, 41, 47, 137, 157, 173 on being aware, 50 on being an external person, 140–1 on being an individual, 142 on boredom, 31 on comparing oneself to others, 45 on egocentric service of the good, 169 on fear of being an individual, 141 on hiding in crowds, 140–2 on interpreting events as calls from eternity, 39–41 on perceiving events, 40 on resistance to goodness, 115, 144 on what death teaches us, 54 Kitcher, Phillip, 106 Kristen, 14 Kristin, 150–1 Lebron, Christopher, 147 Lewis, C. S., 115 life after death as a bonus, 131 as a context for meaning, 113, 116 containing a beatific vision, 125 containing a mix of activities, 126

188

Index

life after death (cont.) desire for, 114–15, 128 as enhancing meaning, 132 free from dividedness, 121 objection to, 124, 127 as perfectly virtuous, 128 resistance to believing, 115 love, 70–4, 80, 81, 86, 88 Lugones, Marίa, 13 Magee, Bryan, 130 Malena, 154, 174 Mark, 92, 94 Marquis, Don, 129 May, Todd, 117 meaning acquired by achieving goals, 58–61, 72 acquired by being creative, 66–8 acquired by being remembered by the Divine One forever, 130 acquired by contemplation of the Divine One, 76, 106, 126 acquired by exemplifying virtues and emotions, 68–70 acquired through giving and receiving love, 73 based on what is worthwhile, 5 degrees of, 97 delight in, 174 desires for, 12–16 enhanced by believing in life after death, 116, 119, 121, 123, 127 enhanced by believing in the Divine One, 100, 102, 104, 105, 107, 152 fighting for, 149 as the good life, 5–6 not requiring belief in the Divine One or life after death, 3, 133 and objective morality, 2, 97 and personal context for, 21 as quotidian, 75 realism about acquiring, 151 and satisfaction of desire, 20–1 subjective component of, 6, 20, 107 and suicide. See suicide and meaning Medicine Bow Peak, 33 Mersault, 124 Metz, Thaddeus, 5 Meursault, 120 Michael, 30, 32 midlife crises, 62

moral perceiving capability, 164 Morris, Thomas, 99, 113, 114 Moser, Paul, 54 Murdoch, Iris, 122 narratives, 113–15 objection to, 118 naturalism, 100, 101, 103, 116 Nicole, 153 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 49, 135–7, 138 noncompetitive play, 13, 15, 129 nonmoral goods, 20, 26, 75, 157 Norris, Kathleen, 140 Nussbaum, Martha, 128 objective morality, 2 obstacles to acquiring meaning constricted circumstances and impaired wills, 146–9 dividedness, 143–6 evading responsibility, 140–2 excessive self-regard, 106, 170 misplaced joys, 167–8 obliviously cheering along with a crowd, 140 unconscious motives, 135–8 using people merely as means, 161, 165–7 openness to goodness, 50–2 Ivan’s stance of, 163 to self-knowledge, 50, 163 to the transcendent, 52 as a voluntary habit, 164 Pascal, Blaise, 10–13, 22, 34, 132 appalled by indifference, 10–13 Paton, Alan, 175 Penny, 79–80, 81, 85, 91, 92, 94 philosophical evangelists, 143 Plato, 51, 140, 157 pleasures as self-exhausting or repeatable, 126 Praskovya Fyodorovna Golovin, 154, 170, 172 pretending to be oneself, 171 Randy, 91 raw humanism, 101 rebellion, 37 rebirth, 49–53

Index religious naturalism, 68 remorse, 39, 169, 171 repression, 46 resistance to goodness, 115, 141, 144, 158–61 blinded by, 162 central in the inner terrain, 159 an entrenched habit, 160 Ivan’s stance of, 161 never total, 161 reverence, 68, 103 reward syndrome, 45, 137 Robert, 8, 16, 17, 147, 149 transformation of, 20 Roberts, Robert C., 28, 57 Russell, Bertrand, 100 Sarah, 98 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 11, 35, 109, 149 Scheffler, Samuel, 127 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 33, 61–6, 150 self-deception, 47 vital, 48 self-honesty, 138–9 Setiya, Kieran, 62–6, 69, 71 Sheralyn, 9, 10, 16 Simler, Kevin, and Robin Hanson, 137 Sisyphus, 37, 38, 58, 66, 82, 84, 87, 90, 124 sloth, 124 Socrates, 3 Solomon, Robert, 56–8, 102 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 145 Steve, 8 Strawson, Galen, 118 suffering, 150 suicide and being loved, 86, 88–90 and believing in the Divine One, 90–2, 93 biological cause for, 84, 95

189

and emotional pain, 82–4, 91, 95 and lacking creativity, 87 and lacking virtues, 88 and meaning, 80–2, 95 and not achieving goals, 84–7 as a response to existential boredom, 38 Svendsen, Lars, 30, 34, 100 Taliaferro, Charles, 106 Taylor, Richard, 59, 63, 66 telic activities, 63 terror, 33, 42, 47, 48, 52, 142 theism, 1, 100, 113 Tolstoy, Leo, 31, 36, 38, 95, 133, 153 Torrey, 74 transcending oneself, 69, 104–7, 121, 169 obstacle to, 122 Trisel, Brooke Alan, 59, 70, 117 unconscious motives, 46, 135–8 urgency of the moral, 156 Useless Person, 114, 121 vainglory, 169 virtues, 26–9, 68–70, 168 Waghorn, Nicholas, 121 Weil, Simone, 51, 146 West, Cornel, 147 Wielenberg, Eric, 103 Williams, Bernard, 124 Wisnewski, Jeremy, 38 Wolf, Susan, 5, 6, 20–1, 29, 59, 60, 70, 85, 107, 114 on an afterlife, 117 and objective value, 101–2 Yalom, Irvin, 45, 53, 67, 95, 105