Richard Taylor on Time, Creativity, and Life's Meaning

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?

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[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.

Notes on Dickens: David Copperfield Remembering His Mother’s Face

David Copperfield (which I’m currently reading) is a fictional autobiography. The narrator, David, is a man who tries to reconstruct, and perhaps to recover, his life through memory. In this, he resembles Proust’s Marcel, being, like him, in search of lost time. In the second chapter of the book he recalls events that occurred when he was still a little boy of perhaps six years old and his mother still a very young and handsome woman. David’s father had died shortly before he was born, and David and his mother had been very close until she met a new man whom she would soon marry. The man turns out to be a tyrant, his mother is too weak to oppose him, and David is sent away to a boarding school in another part of the country. Yet the adult David, looking back on his life, remembers his mother as she was before that time, shortly after she had met that man and when she still dared to show her son how much she loved him. And it is in his memory that the person that she once was is kept alive:

“Can I say of her face – altered as I have reason to remember it, perished as I know it is – that it is gone, when here it comes before me at this instant, as distinct as any face that I may choose to look on in a crowded street? Can I say of her innocent and girlish beauty, that it faded, and was no more, when its breath falls on my cheek now, as it fell that night? Can I say she ever changed, when my remembrance brings her back to life, thus only; and, truer to its loving youth than I have been, or man ever is, still holds fast what it cherished then?”

David’s mother is of course long gone, and even if she were still alive, she would be old now and no longer innocent and girlishly beautiful. Yet in his memory she still is and will always be, as long as he is there to remember her. What interests me in David’s account is the suggestion that the past is not really gone, that it is not really past at all, except in the sense that we can no longer fully access it, no longer go there. It is rather like a place that we once lived in, but now have been barred from ever visiting again, and which is still out there, somewhere, unchanged. Like a Garden of Eden (though not necessarily a nice one), whose gates have been slammed shut in our faces and are now guarded by a couple of cherubim to make sure that we can never go back there again. It suggests that time is just another form of space, and that is exactly what I feel when I look back at my own life. (I suppose you could say it is a B-Series experience of time, which knows no past or future, but only earlier and later.) It feels as if I had lived in different temporal worlds, as if the boy that I once was still existed in a parallel universe, and the troubled teenager in another, and the student, and the young father in yet another. It is phases of my life (not moments) that each seem to have created their own universe. Each of these phases is connected to particular places, which today are of course no longer the same places, not because they have changed so much, but because I no longer belong there. They would no longer know me. Those creations are not possible worlds of events that have never occurred because I didn’t act in such a way that they would occur (but which could have occurred if I had), but actual worlds, of events that did occur, which my memory (and a strange sort of longing) presents to me as worlds that still co-exist with the world that I am currently inhabiting.

I’m not even sure this idea makes sense, but then again, it is time itself, and not any particular account of it, that seems to defy understanding. How can we understand that there once was a time, not long ago, when we didn’t exist, and that there will be a time, very soon, when we no longer exist? How can we understand that we might easily have not existed at all, and generally, that something that exists at one moment can at some other moment not exist? How can anything ever be lost for good, simply disappear from the world? How can the world itself have a beginning, and how an end? And how can it not have? Perhaps those philosophers, from Parmenides to John McTaggart, who have claimed that there is, ultimately, no time, that time is an illusion, are right after all.

Do Angels Have Genitals? A Curious Proof of God’s Existence

The odd question whether angels have genitals, which already occupied the minds of countless scholastic theologians, was raised again by the great Jewish-German philosopher Hans Jonas in an article that was published in 1990 in the journal Scheidewege (which, I’m proud to say, I have been co-editing for more than a decade now). The article is called “Vergangenheit und Wahrheit” (Past and Truth) and has, as far as I know, yet to be translated into English. I’ve stumbled across this article because I have been asked to write a paper on Hans Jonas for a collection on “New Contintental Perspectives on Medicine and Society”, edited by Darian Meacham, and although that particular article is perhaps not very relevant in this context, I couldn’t help being fascinated by the argument that Jonas presents here: a new and actually quite original and convincing proof (as far as such proofs go) of the existence of God.

When Jonas asks whether angels have genitals he is of course not looking for an answer. Rather, he uses the question to make a point, namely that it doesn’t make any sense to argue about the properties of something that doesn’t exist. It is neither true to say that angels have genitals, nor is it false. Nor would it be quite correct to say that neither do angels have genitals nor do they not have them. They do not belong to a class of things to which the laws of logic do not apply. Instead, they are not things at all; they are literally nothing, so that it doesn’t even make sense to ask the question whether or not they have genitals.

However, among the things that do not exist, are also all past events. What is past, no longer exists. It may have existed once, but now it does not exist. Yet we tend to assume that statements about past events are true or false, even though we may never be able to ascertain which statements are true and which false. Did Napoleon blow his nose on that fateful day when he lost the battle of Waterloo? Did he think of his former wife Josephine who had died the year before? Did he try to figure out whether angels have genitals? Even though nothing has been recorded that would answer those questions, it nonetheless seems that there must be an answer, that either he did those things, or he did not do them. But if the past does not exist, if it, or at least that particular part of the past, is completely and utterly gone, unrecorded and not remembered by anyone, then do we not have to conclude that the question whether or not Napoleon thought of Josephine during the battle of Waterloo is just as meaningless as the question whether angels have genitals? And meaningless not because we could never know whether the answer someone gave was true or false, but rather because there is no fact in relation to which an answer could be true or false. Napoleon, being past and gone and hence a non-existent entity, did not think about Josephine, nor did he not think about her. Napoleon does not exist, and non-existent entities do not think.

Too weird a thought? Try to look at it from this angle: we are used to say that past events cannot change. They are fixed, always stay what they were. Either Napoleon did think about Josephine or he did not, and if he did, he will always have thought about her on that particular day, and if he did not, he will never have thought about her that day. But if the past does not exist, how can it be fixed? How can it be unchangeable? In order to be unchangeable, it seems, the past must in some way still exist. It must be there to have properties. But where, or how exactly, is it? Let us imagine an Orwellian government that is powerful and determined enough to destroy all the traces of the real past, that changed all the history books, all documents that tell us about what really happened, and thus invented a new past, which would then, for us and for everyone and for all practical purposes and for all that anyone will ever know, be the past. Or would it? Yet if there is no trace of the real past left, in what way is it the real past?

Jonas suggests that in order to make sense of our belief that past events are real, so that statements about the past have a truth value (i.e., are either true or false), we must assume that there is something that preserves the past in the present, and that means the whole past, every single detail of it. So what we need is a kind of cosmic memory in which nothing ever gets forgotten. But a memory cannot exist on its own, but only as part or aspect of a subject who remembers. And that subject is God.

Jonas is of course quite aware that these reflections do not amount to a full-blown proof. It’s just an idea, a probably feeble attempt to make sense of it all, but I personally find it strangely persuasive. Let us again use our imagination. This time let’s imagine the world in a few billion years, shortly after the earth has been absorbed by the sun. Nothing is left of life on earth. Nobody that remembers any of it. No traces of anything that happened before this event anywhere. The situation is exactly like it would be if there never had been any life on earth, no humanity, no you or me. Nothing any of us has ever done or is ever going to do will have made a difference. Yet if at some stage in the future the world is exactly like it would be if we had never existed, so that there is no difference between a world in which we existed and a world in which we didn’t, then in what way have we existed at that time? If there is no difference between those two worlds, then there is no difference between our having existed and our not having existed.

It seems to me that this conundrum also has ethical implications. If it is all going to be the same in the end, then in the long run it doesn’t make any difference what we do. So why bother? Why try to do the right thing? Do we not, in order to think that what we do matters, have to believe that somehow, in some form, what we do lives on, not just for a while, but forever? That there is some kind of cosmic memory that remembers, and will always remember, what we did, and for which it does make a difference?

Temporal Immortality

I just finished writing a chapter for a volume of commentaries on the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer's masterwork "The World as Will and Representation". My job was to cover the paragraphs 53 to 59, which deal with the nature of ethics (which can only ever be descriptive and never prescriptive), the immutability of character, the ubiquity and unavoidability of suffering, and finally death, or more precisely the unreality of death. I’ve always been fascinated by this latter part of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, and I find myself very much inclined to believe that what Schopenhauer argues here must be true: that we don’t die, that death is not real, that it’s just an illusion.

For Schopenhauer this conclusion follows logically from his metaphysical premises, according to which the world we know and we live in is merely an appearance. What we perceive is not the world as it is, but rather what our cognitive apparatus makes of it. It is a representation. Of what? Of the will, which is the true nature of all things, ourselves included. The world is the way the will appears to itself. If we imagine the will to be looking into a mirror, then the image reflected would be the world. And we are that will, just as everything else is. By distinguishing the will, which is the only really real thing, from its representation, which is a mere shadow, Schopenhauer, drawing very much on Kant’s transcendental philosophy, manages to separate reality from its forms of appearance, which include causality, space, and most importantly, time. So in other words, time is an illusion. But if time is an illusion, then change must also be one. And if change is an illusion, then death is too. We don’t die. It just looks (to others) as if we did.

Now if we had to accept Schopenhauer’s metaphysics and its corollary, that time is not real, to appreciate his argument for what he calls “temporal immortality”, then it would perhaps be of little interest to anyone. It is just too difficult to believe that time does not exist. I doubt that it even makes sense to claim that. However, it seems to me that Schopenhauer’s argument for temporal immortality does not require us to believe in the non-existence of time. It is in fact very complex and draws on many different sources and reflections. Much of it is based on peculiarities of the way we experience life and death. For one thing, although we don’t really, on a theoretical level, doubt that we, too, will one day have to die, we are also, deep down, convinced of our own personal immortality. It is just impossible to imagine that one day we could have ceased to exist, that the world will continue to be, but we will no longer be in it. How can there be a world if we are not there to perceive it? From our perspective it will be as if the world had never existed. It will end when we end. So if the world continues to exist (as we suppose), then we will too.

The main point, though, is this: our individual existence is linked to our consciousness. This particular consciousness can cease to exist, but that is only part of what we are, and perhaps a very superficial part. What makes us alive in the first place is not consciousness, but something deeper and less fleeting: a material urge, a force that pervades physical nature, an élan vital (as the French philosopher Henri Bergson called it) or will to live (as Schopenhauer calls it). This force of nature, this will, will continue to exist when “we” die, and in fact it does already exist in many other forms and ways. This force is active in me, as it is active in you and every other living creature. And to the extent that each of us ultimately is this force, this will to live, we always exist not only in this particular form, which we call our individual self, but also in everything else. When you look into the world with your eyes, perceive it with your senses, live in it with your body and your mind, then I look and perceive and live with you, because you are only another version of myself, just as I am only another version of yourself. Accordingly, when I die I will live on in you, and when you die, you will live on in me. In any case, the presence cannot be lost.

“Since will is the thing in itself, the inner substance of the world, that which is essential to it, while life, the visible world, the phenomenon, is only the mirror of the will, the latter will accompany will as inseparably as its shadow accompanies a body; and if will exists, so too life, the world will exist. To the will for life, life is thus certain, and so long as we are filled with the will for life, we cannot be concerned for our existence, not even at the sight of our death.”

“Above all, we must distinctly recognize that the form pertaining to will’s phenomenon, thus the form of life or reality, is only the present, not future nor past: these exist only in concepts, exist only in the context of cognizance so far as it follows the Principle of Sufficient Ground. No human being has lived in the past, and none will ever live in the future; rather the present alone is the form pertaining to all life, but it is also its sure possession, which can never be torn from it. The present always exists, together with its content; both stand firm, without wavering, like the rainbow on the waterfall. For life is sure and certain for will, and the present for life.”

If you don’t find this whole idea total bollocks, I recommend that you have a look at the original argument, which can be found in both § 54 of the first volume of “The World as Will and Representation” (published in 1819), from which the above quotes were taken, and in chapter 41 of the second volume (published 25 years later, in 1844). My advice would actually be to start with that later exposition because it is more comprehensive and has more the character of an independent essay rather than that of a chapter in a book with an ongoing argument. Also of interest might be a more recent version of the argument developed by Arnold Zuboff in his article “One Self: the Logic of Experience” (Inquiry 33 (1990): 39-68). Zuboff argues, without recourse to Schopenhauer, that your self and my self are in fact the same self, that, based on the logic of experience, there is in fact only one self.  

Ishiguro on Life's Turning Points

Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, which was first published in 1989, was recently reissued as an Everyman’s Library Contemporary Classic, which prompted me to read it. I had never done so before, just watched, several times I believe, the film with Anthony Hopkins as Mr Stevens, the butler who wastes his life away in an at first unthinking and then increasingly desperate attempt to uphold an idea of dignity that even he himself cannot help realising is ultimately a mere excuse for not engaging with other people and with what is going on in the world. It is a kind of professional autism, and the considerable pride that Stevens seems to take in it, barely conceals the emptiness of a life that is spent entirely in the service of another, in complete identification with a particular role, which is constantly worn like a mask or camouflage. Emma Thompson played the housekeeper Miss Kent and the woman who might have loved him if he had only managed to open up a bit, to show some human feeling. But he never does, and then it’s too late, she leaves and never comes back. He had his chance, his one chance of redemption, of becoming an active player in the world instead of merely watching it from the sidelines, and he missed it. It’s a thoroughly depressing story of a failed life.   

The story is being told by Stevens himself. As a narrator he is clearly unreliable, his memory distorted not only by the passage of time, but also by his need to think good of himself, to see his past actions as justified and his life as meaningful. However, he is not entirely blind to the fact that some of his choices (though as a reader one never quite feels that he ever does have a real choice) eventually led to consequences that, if he had been aware of them, he would have rather wished to avoid. But the trouble is, and that is a problem not only for Stevens, but for all of us, that we don’t always know which of all the many things that we do will turn our lives in a direction that we might later find impossible to reverse. Only in retrospect do we realise that an action or event that at the time seemed rather insignificant, just a little thing really, actually had huge repercussions and markedly shaped our fate. In the novel, Stevens comes to the conclusion that one of the major turning points in his life came when he, yet again, rebuked the housekeeper Miss Kent for a minor oversight. He doesn’t really understand what exactly happened that day and why it should have had the consequence it did have, but he is acutely aware that it was the point when she slipped out of his reach for good. He wonders briefly what would have happened if he had acted differently, but then quickly shies away from dwelling too much on the matter:

“But what is the sense in forever speculating what might have happened had such and such a moment turned out differently? One could presumably drive oneself to distraction in this way. In any case, while it is all very well to talk of ‘turning points’, one can surely only recognize such moments in retrospect. Naturally, when one looks back to such instances today, they may indeed take the appearance of being crucial, precious moments in one’s life; but of course, at the time, this was not the impression one had. Rather, it was as though one had available a never-ending number of days, months, years in which to sort out the vagaries of one’s relationship with Miss Kenton; an infinite number of further opportunities in which to remedy the effect of this or that misunderstanding. There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.”

Stevens may well be right that we often overlook the significance of events and actions, but we may still draw a lesson from his failure to secure happiness for himself, or at least the chance to find happiness. Things done cannot be undone, but it is equally true that things undone often cannot be done at a later time. Especially in human relationships small things have a tendency to add up until eventually a breaking point is reached. You fail to make a phone call to acknowledge a friend’s birthday, and that, without being obvious at the time, effectively brings an end to that friendship. Or you have one argument too many with your spouse, or you say something, in the heat of the moment, that you don’t really mean, and the other never forgets it, and never forgives, and everything is suddenly very different from what it used to be. So what is there to be learned? I guess it is something very simple, very banal really, a truism: we should try to figure out what is really important to us and then work hard to make sure that we get it, and, once we have got it, not to lose it. Don’t take things, and especially relationships, for granted. Not ever. They are fragile and need to be cultivated. What’s undone cannot be redone. What is lost can never be retrieved. So let’s try not to lose, or make it impossible for ourselves to reach, what gives, or would give, meaning and light to our lives.

The Old Wells and the Young Wells

The Time Machine was published in 1895 when Wells was a young man of just 28. And as I pointed out in my last post, the picture that Wells draws here of the future of humanity is pretty bleak.  However, I was surprised to find that when a new edition of The Time Machine was published in 1931, thirty-six years later, Wells, now 65, wrote a preface in which he all but denigrates his youthful endeavour. Not only does he now find his description of the social differentiation of humanity into Eloi and Morlocks rather crude, he is also quite apologetic about what he calls the “naïve pessimism” of the book, which he blames on the influence that Jonathan Swift had on his younger self and on the “dreadful lies” fabricated by late Victorian geologists who made everyone believe that in a million years or so everything will be over for life on earth because the entire planet will be frozen over. But science, Wells believes, has progressed enormously during the last thirty years, and now assures us with more authority than ever that in fact we’ve got “millions of millions of years” of further human development to look forward to. Assuming this to be true, “man will be able to do anything and go anywhere, and the only trace of pessimism left in the human prospect today is a faint flavour of regret that one was born so soon. And even from that distress modern psychological and biological philosophy offers ways of escape.”

So the young pessimist has turned into an old optimist, which I should think is rather unusual. Normally we start out as optimists, until life experience gradually transforms us into pessimists. And normally it is the optimists who strike us as naïve. “Naïve pessimism” seems almost a contradiction in terms. But I guess we can just as easily be naïve pessimists as we can be naïve optimists if our respective attitudes are rooted in prejudice and are expressive of our fears or hopes rather than an accurate assessment of probabilities based on a clear understanding of the facts. Yet if Wells’s early pessimism appears naïve to the old Wells, would not the old Wells’s optimism have appeared equally naïve to the young Wells? Not always do we become wiser when we get older, although we may always think we do. Is it really more informed, more astute and showing a firmer grasp of reality, to believe that eventually we “will be able to do anything and go anywhere”? That a completely limitless existence lies ahead of us? That even if this is all going to happen not now, but at some time in the future, science will find a way to help us survive until then, to “escape” from the present in which all those wonderful things that we will be able to do in the future are not possible yet? Life extension as the new time machine, an elevator to the future? Of course, before we really get there we won’t know who is more naïve: those who tend to believe that the scientific and technological advancement of humanity will eventually lead to a paradise on earth, or those who worry that it might end in some catastrophe or another.

But be that as it may, it appears that at the very end of his life Wells, now in his late seventies, went full circle when he once again changed his mind about the future prospects of humanity and became more pessimistic even than “that needy and cheerful namesake of his, who lived back along the time dimension, six and thirty years ago”, and whom he remembers, slightly embarrassed, but also with a certain fondness, in the 1931 preface to the new edition of The Time Machine. On the eve of his departure from this world, it seems to him that instead of evolving any further, it might be, all things considered, much better if humanity simply ceased to exist.

H.G. Wells’s Time Machine and the Future of Humanity

I must have been seven or eight years old when I first met the time traveller. My parents and I were spending the day at my grandparents’, as we did on most Sundays, and as usual I was bored stiff because nobody would talk to me, my grandparents didn’t have any games or toys, and there were no books that invited me to read them. All they had was a mean old dog who barked madly and threatened to bite me whenever I tried to get up from the sofa or made a movement that alerted him to the fact that I was still alive. He seemed determined to change that. But on this particular day I was lucky. Not only was the dog exhausted from a long walk in the park and for the time being showed no interest in harassing me any further, I was also granted permission to switch on the television. They were showing a film, and it had just started. It was “The Time Machine”, the 1960 version with Rod Taylor, and for the next ninety minutes or so I was lost to the world.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen a film that impressed me as much as this one. I was not only fascinated by the idea of time travelling, but also utterly enthralled by the story woven around it and the images that brought the story to life. For many weeks after, I had recurring, nightmarish dreams of the beautiful and gentle, but rather dumb Eloi and the creepy, demonic Morlocks with their greenish skin and red eyes, who scared the hell out of me.

It was many years later that I finally read the book by H.G. Wells on which the film was based. I was already in my twenties, and by then the idea of time travel had lost some of its early fascination for me. The Morlocks, too, were rather disappointing. So I can’t really say that at that time the book made a lasting impression on me. However, last night, more than twenty years later, I read it again, and I was surprised to see what a marvellous writer Wells actually was. And the future of humanity that he shows us is a far cry from the superglossed one that transhumanists and other enhancement enthusiasts keep dangling in front of our noses. What awaits us in his vision is not an “engineered Paradise” (David Pearce), nor “lives wonderful beyond imagination” (Nick Bostrom), even though at first glance it looks like a paradise and it was actually meant to be one. It’s a dystopia that started out as a eutopia, and that still disguises itself as one. But Wells shows us that every paradise has a dark side, that there’s always a price to pay, and that what seems to be progress may well prove to be humanity’s downfall. It is quite likely that as a species we will develop further, and it’s even possible that we are able to steer that development in the direction that appears most desirable to us. But that doesn’t mean that we will like what we will get. We tend to think of the posthuman as something that is better than a mere human, more advanced, an improved human. But the posthuman may just as well turn out to be in some important respect less than human.

But of course, for Wells it’s even worse than that. Wells’s time traveller travels further and further into the future until eventually even those shrunken versions of our present selves have vanished. Wells allows us a glimpse at a time when we’ll all be gone for good, and there will be nothing left. It will be as if we had never existed, the world an empty, desolate place. No humans, no posthumans, nothing, just tohu wa-bohu. It’s a truly chilling prospect, masterly set on scene by Wells:

“The darkness grew apace; a cold wind began to blow in freshening gusts from the east, and the showering white flakes in the air increased in number. From the edge of the sea came a ripple and whisper. Beyond these lifeless sounds the world was silent. Silent? It would be hard to convey the stillness of it. All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives – all that was over. As the darkness thickened, the eddying flakes grew more abundant, dancing before my eyes; and the cold of the air more intense. At last, one by one, swiftly, one after the other, the white peaks of the distant hills vanished into blackness. The breeze rose to a moaning wind. I saw the black central shadow of the eclipse sweeping towards me. In another moment the pale stars alone were visible. All else was rayless obscurity. The sky was absolutely black.”

Surprisingly, however, the novel ends on an optimistic note. The time traveller has brought home from his journey two flowers from the pre-desolation future and passes them on to the story’s narrator before he leaves once more, never to return again. Those two flowers provide some comfort to the narrator, despite everything that is going to happen, because they remind him of what truly matters in life:

“And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers – shrivelled now, and brown and flat and brittle – to witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of man.”

In the longest run our prospects may be very bleak indeed, but as long as we can hold on to that “mutual tenderness”, all is not lost.