Sometimes
we change our view of things. Perhaps we had doubts all along, or something
happened that made us reconsider, or we have simply thought some more about the
issue, so that eventually we reach a different conclusion. Philosophers are no
exception. They change their views, too, sometimes dramatically. One example is
Richard Taylor, who, in his 1970 paper “The Meaning of Life”[1]
argued that all that is required for a meaningful life (and “the nearest we may
hope to get to heaven”) is that there is something in it that we pursue energetically,
an “inner compulsion” to do whatever it is we do. If this inner compulsion is
what makes life meaningful, then it is conceivable that even the endlessly
repetitive life of a blind worm in a cave and the endlessly repetitive life of
a Sisyphus who desires nothing more than rolling rocks up hills are meaningful.
However, in a second paper on the topic, “Time and Life’s Meaning”, published
17 years later,[2]
Taylor renounces the claims he made previously and now argues that even the
life of a happy, passionately rock-rolling Sisyphus is far from meaningful
because it lacks one crucial ingredient: creativity.
Taylor’s
new argument starts with a reflection on the reality of time. Contrary to the
countless philosophers, from Plato to McTaggart, who have claimed that time
cannot possibly be real, Taylor very sensibly insists that it feels far too real to be an illusion. On
the other hand, however, the reality of time is very much dependent on us. If there were no creatures like us, Taylor
suggests, time would not be (fully) real. Imagine a world entirely devoid of
life. Such a world would have no “history or meaning” (297). Time may exist in
some abstract way, but it is completely irrelevant because it “makes no
difference” what happens when. In that sense, time, in such a world, is not
real yet. Now add living beings to this world (but still holding back on rational beings). According to Taylor, time
has now been introduced to the world, but still only in a very rudimentary
sense. Importantly, a world containing living but not rational beings would
still be a world without history because nothing genuinely new ever happens in it.
“The sun that rises one day illuminates nothing that was not there the day
before, or a thousand or million days before. It is simply the same world, age
after age. (…) Every sparrow is just like every other, does exactly the same
things in the same way without innovation, then to be imitated by every sparrow
to follow. The robin or squirrel you see today does nothing different from
those you saw as a child, and could be interchanged with them without discernible
difference.” (298)[3]
Animals live their lives in “unchanging cycles”, “to be repeated over and over,
forever.”
Clearly,
Taylor is still concerned with repetition and futility, the not-getting-anywhere
that in his previous paper he ended up defending as posing no obstacle to a
meaningful life. Not so anymore. According to the new Taylor, the repetitive
world, the world that goes nowhere, is not only a world without history, but
also, precisely for this reason, a world without meaning. This is because in a
world without history “nothing is ever created.” (299) As a perfect
illustration of such a meaningless world, Taylor once again invokes the myth of
Sisyphus. Existence is here “reduced to utter meaninglessness”. And in stark
contrast to his earlier position, Taylor now claims that what Sisyphus is doing
would still be meaningless “even if
we imagined Sisyphus to rejoice in it – if we imagined, for example, that he
had a compulsive and insatiable desire to roll stones, and considered himself
blessed to be able to do this forever.” (299)
Only
if we imagine Sisyphus actually creating
something (out of all the rocks he rolls up that hill), and doing so consciously and purposefully, something “beautiful and lasting”, something “important”
(for instance a “great temple”), only then could we see his life as meaningful
because his labour would “no longer be wasted and pointless.” (299) Fully meaningful, however, it would only
be if Sisyphus did not have to do
what he is doing, but had freely chosen
to do it. Whatever he is creating “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.”[4]
(300) This is a kind of creative activity that cannot be found in nature: it
requires rational beings “who can think, imagine, plan, and execute things of
worth”. Everything that may strike us as an example of immense creativity in
the non-human world, like “the complex beauty of the spider’s web” or “the
ingenious construction of the honeycomb”, is in fact just another example of “endless
repetitions”, a “capacity of fabrication”, which discloses “not the least hint
of creative power” (301). Genuine creativity brings forth things that are
genuinely new. Only humans have that kind of creativity, though not everyone
has it in the same degree. It can also be exercised in various different areas
of life, not only in art, but also in, e.g., chess-playing, gardening, or
woodworking, and even in the “raising of a beautiful family” (302). However,
Taylor admits that “creative power is no common possession” (not to speak of
creative genius, which is very rare). In fact, the “work of the vast majority
of persons does not deviate much from what others have already done and from
what can be found everywhere.” (302) Taylor blames this on a certain widespread
unwillingness to actually use one’s
creative powers. Most people simply don’t care
enough about being the creators that they could be. Or they are afraid of
standing out. It is in fact often religion
that discourages us from using our creative powers, despite the fact that God
is conceived as the creator (so that developing our creativity is actually tantamount
to developing our divine potential). Creative power has an “indescribable worth”,
which is why it gives human existence its significance and meaning: “That a
world should exist is not finally important, nor does it mean much, by itself,
that people should inhabit it. But that some of these should, in varying
degrees, be capable of creating worlds of their own and history – thereby creating
time in its historical sense – is what gives our lives whatever meaning they
have.” (303)
COMMENTARY:
Taylor
argues that without us, or without rational beings, time would not be (fully)
real because there would not be any history. I can go along with this, but only
because I associate “history” with memory. Things (people, countries,
technologies) have a history to the extent that we remember the changes that
those things have undergone, thus connecting the past to the present. Memory
makes history. Taylor, however, does not even mention memory. Instead, he
focuses on the notion of the “new”. A world without history is a world in which
nothing new happens. Such a world is declared to be meaningless not because the
past is not remembered, but because the past is supposed to be pretty much
(that is, in all relevant respects) identical to the present, as the future
will be identical to the present. The sun illuminates always the same
spectacle. It’s the same world over and over again. But is it really? I guess the
answer depends on what we choose to mean by “new”. It seems obvious to me that
in many ways there is undeniably newness even in a world without life. Continents
form and fall apart, seas dry out, flat surfaces fold into mountains. And there
are even more changes, more new things happening, in a world populated by
living, though not rational beings. If the sun had eyes to see what is going on
here on Earth, what it would see today would be very different from what it
would have seen 70 million years ago when the dinosaurs still roamed about. Species
come and go; old ones disappear, new ones enter the stage. And those new
species could not have been predicted. None of those changes could have. So in
what sense exactly is all that has happened in the world since its creation
before the arrival of human beings devoid of newness? Perhaps in the sense that
even though this particular kind of
animal never existed before, animals have, and this one is just more of the
same? But couldn’t we say the same about human productions, even highly
artistic and original ones? Sure, a new nocturne of Chopin’s (one of Taylor’s
examples of true newness) is different from the previous ones, but it would
still be a nocturne, and still be a musical composition. And even though Chopin
might be different from other composers, he is still a composer who basically
does what other composers also do, namely compose stuff. How do we distinguish
the genuinely or relevantly new from the ordinary and not really new? I for one
am struggling to clearly understand the difference.
Neither
am I convinced by the claim that every sparrow is the same as every other,
doing exactly what all other sparrows do and have done since the beginning of
time (or the beginning of sparrows). To a casual observer this may indeed appear
to be the case, but I’m pretty sure that if you looked more closely you would
find that even sparrows are individuals and do not generally behave exactly
like any other sparrow. (And for each one of them, what they do is very new to
them. As if it were in fact the first time that it’s being done. That’s
actually the advantage of having no history: an abundance of newness.) Of
course, they all do what sparrows do. They live a sparrow’s life, and the
general features of that life are fixed. But the same is true for us. We are
alike in many ways, and behave alike in many ways. Everything we do is confined
by the human life form. We do what humans do and never go beyond that.
In
“The Meaning of Life”, Taylor radically democratized the meaning of life. He
was willing to grant meaning to every sentient being that took a lively
interest in something, and be it only eating and reproducing. Perhaps that took
things a bit too far. In “Time and Life’s Meaning”, however, Taylor goes too
far again by claiming more or less the exact opposite of what he claimed before.
He now basically declares that a truly or fully meaningful life can only be had
by the creative geniuses of this world, so in other words by very few. In order
to live a meaningful life we need to find something that only we can do. We
need to be truly special. Do we really, though, I wonder. Do we have to do
something that nobody else has done before and nobody could do the way we do
it? Why? Why must a meaningful existence manifest itself as the exceptional
rather than the ordinary? Why do I have to be different from others for my life
to have meaning? I suspect the answer has something to do with a notion of irreplaceability.
If we are not different, if we do not bring something into the world that nobody
else could bring into it, then nothing really depends on us being here. With or
without us, the world continues unchanged. But what is wrong with that?
[1] Cf. my summary of, and commentary
on, Taylor’s “The Meaning of Life”: https://www.academia.edu/31806748/Richard_Taylor_on_the_Meaning_of_Life
[2] Richard Taylor, “Time and Life’s
Meaning”, The Review of Metaphysics
40/4 (1987): 675-686. Reprinted in: Exploring
the Meaning of Life. An Anthology and Guide, ed. Joshua W. Seachris,
Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell 2013, 296-303. I am using and citing the reprinted
version.
[3] I’m pretty sure Taylor has this
idea from Schopenhauer, whom he, as the editor of The Will to Live: Selected Writings of Arthur Schopenhauer (1967),
knew well enough. Schopenhauer claims that the cat I now see sitting on the
fence is literally the same cat that was
basking in the sun a hundred years ago. But that is of course because
Schopenhauer did not believe in the reality of time. As an objective
manifestation of the Will, the species
cat exists, but the individual cat does
not because it is just the way the species appears through the lens of time.
[4] Such a thoroughly re-imagined
Sisyphus would of course no longer be a Sisyphus, except in name.
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