Richard M. Hare on what it means to say that something matters

What exactly do we mean when we say that “nothing matters”? Richard Hare attempts to answer this question in an early (1957) essay.[1] The way he answers it is intended to convince us that the view that “nothing matters” (or in other words existential nihilism) is an untenable, for most of us even nonsensical position, and quite obviously so.

Hare starts his essay by relating the story of a young Swiss student staying with the Hares, who after reading Camus’ L’Etranger suddenly became convinced that “nothing matters”. Hare then proceeded to talk him out of it in Socratic fashion. Here is how: when we say that something matters what we do is express concern about that something. Concern, however, is always somebody’s concern. Therefore, when I say that something matters I express my concern for it. I am saying that it matters to me. Accordingly, when you say the same, then you express your concern for that thing. You are saying that it matters to you. Neither of us is then really saying anything about the thing in question. We are only saying something about ourselves.

Now most of us are in fact concerned about many things. And so, apparently, was Hare’s Swiss student, which means that things did matter to him, which means that they did matter, period. For the statement “nothing matters” to be true it would have to be true that the one who makes the statement is not concerned about anything at all. So if I am the one who says that nothing matters, then this is true if and only if nothing matters to me, and if you are the one who says it, then it is true if and only if nothing matters to you. Yet if it were true that nothing mattered to me, why would I then bother to make that statement in the first place? It seems I would at least have to care enough about something to find it worth pointing out to the world that nothing matters, in which case I would have immediately contradicted myself.

The reason we may not be immediately aware of this contradiction is that we tend to misunderstand the function of the word “matters”. Its function is to express (somebody’s) concern. It does not tell us anything about the nature of things. Contrary to what we seem to think when we declare that nothing matters (or seriously wonder whether it might be true that nothing matters), mattering is not something that things do. My wife may both chatter and matter, but while the chattering is something that my wife actually does,[2] the mattering is not. In that sense it is quite true that (strictly speaking) no thing matters, from which we can easily, but mistakenly, derive the conclusion that nothing matters: we take a deep and hard look at things, fail to observe any mattering activity in them, and then conclude that nothing matters. However, we have looked in the wrong place. We should have looked at ourselves. If we had done that we would most likely have found that some things do matter, namely to us and therefore in the only way something can matter.

This is not to say that there are no people out there who are not very much concerned about anything. But they are an exception, and even if nothing or nothing much matters to them, this has absolutely no bearing on the question what matters, or should matter, to us. Instead of wondering whether things matter, Hare suggests in conclusion, we’d better ask ourselves what matters to us, what matters most to us, and what should matter to us and how much it should matter. These are all important life questions. Whether things matter is not.

COMMENTARY:

The obvious question to ask here is of course whether Hare is right to say that what we mean (and all we can mean) when we say that something matters is that it matters to us. Is the function of saying “it matters” really the expression of one’s own personal concern, and nothing else? Is there really no difference between “this is important” and “I find this important”? Personally, I am inclined to agree with Hare, mostly because I don’t see how things can matter if they don’t matter to someone, and how they can matter other than by mattering to someone. On the other hand, it seems to me that when we say something like “nothing matters” we do not really mean to say that nothing matters to us. That is why we would, when we say this, not feel contradicted if somebody pointed out to us that some things do in fact matter to us. We already knew that, and never meant to deny it. So it seems it is something else that we wished to express by saying that ‘nothing matters’. But the question is, what do we mean if we don’t mean that nothing matters to us? I find this question very difficult to answer. Consider the following fictional dialogue between A and B:

A: Nothing matters!

B: What do you mean, nothing matters?

A: What I said.

B: So what you mean is that nothing matters to you, right?

A: No, I don’t mean that at all. In fact, it matters very much to me that nothing matters. I’m extremely concerned about it!

B: But if you are concerned about it, if it matters to you that nothing matters, then there clearly is something that matters.

A: Yes, but only to me. The point is that it doesn’t really matter what matters to me or if there is anything that matters to me. It doesn’t matter whether or not things matter to people, me included.

B: Okay, but what do you mean when you say it doesn’t matter? If they matter to you, and they matter to me, if there is somebody to whom they matter, how can they still not matter?

A: They do not matter in the sense that it makes no difference whether or not they matter to me, or, for that matter, if they exist or not exist.

B: No difference to you, you mean?

A: No, not to me. To me it does make a difference.

B: To whom then?

A: To nobody in particular. It simply makes no difference.

B: But it does make a difference. After all, if those things didn’t exist or if they were different, other things would be different, too, wouldn’t they?

A: Yes, but not in the long run. A time will come when the world will be exactly as it would have been if things had been different. Say in 5 billion years when the sun will swell up and swallow Earth. None of the things that we do now will then have made any difference. So I guess what I mean when I say nothing matters is that nothing matters ultimately or in the long run.

B: Okay, fine, perhaps what happens now and what we do and whether we live or die makes no difference for the long-term future. But all of this certainly makes a difference now. Why should we want it to make a difference for all eternity?

A: Well, I guess you are right. Although when that future comes, there will also be nobody left to whom anything matters that matters to us now. So then nothing will matter anymore, right?

B: Yes, correct, but why should we worry about that? Perhaps it is true that there will come a time when nothing matters any more, but that time is not here yet. That nothing will matter does in no way show that nothing matters, namely now. So what is your problem?

A: I don’t know. You are confusing me. Let’s go and have a drink. It doesn’t really matter anyway.

Still, it remains difficult to consistently think about ‘importance’ or ‘mattering’ the way that Hare suggests we do. Hare himself seems to forget what he has just told us when, in the last paragraph of his essay, he advises us to “learn to prize those things whose true value is apparent only to those who have fought hard to reach it.” (46) This is clearly something that matters to Hare. However, in suggesting that this matters he is also clearly not merely expressing his own concerns. He is, rather, expressing the belief that we, too, should be concerned about it. So ‘this matters’, at least in this particular instance, means, in addition to “this matters to me (= Hare)”, “this should matter to you (= the reader)”. Why should it, though? The reason seems to have something to do with some things being truly valuable and others not, yet in light of Hare’s own analysis it makes little sense to assert that things have a “true value” that is not always apparent to us. In accordance with Hare’s analysis of the meaning of ‘X matters’, it seems that what we mean (and all we can mean) when we say that “something has true value” is that it has true value for us. But in that case it would make no sense to say that the “true value” may not be apparent to us. If having such a value means having such a value for us, then it needs to be apparent to us. Yet the very term “true value” is designed to suggest that we may be mistaken about a thing’s true value (just as, perhaps, we can be mistaken about what truly matters, or that things matter at all). “True value” implies the possibility of “false value”, but it would be very odd to say that certain things have a false value for me. They either have value or they don’t. That their value is false can only mean that even though they appear to be valuable to me, they are in fact not valuable at all. Accordingly, to say that something is truly valuable can only mean that it has value even if I am unable to see it (so that it has no value for me). If nothing matters unless, and to the extent that, it matters to someone, then nothing has value either, unless, and to the extent that, it has value for someone.

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[1] “’Nothing Matters’” was written in 1957 when Hare was 38. It was originally published in French as “Rien n’a d’importance” in La Philosophie Analytique, Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit 1959, and later reprinted in English in Hare’s Applications of Moral Philosophy, London: Macmillan 1972, 32–47. I am using another reprint, namely the one in Life, Death and Meaning, ed. David Benatar, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield 2004, 41-47.

[2] Note to my wife: this is Hare’s example, not mine.

Thomas Nagel on the Absurd

It is often said that life is absurd. However, it is not always clear what exactly we mean by that. What, if anything, makes it absurd, and why do we think, as we seem to do, that life’s being absurd is something we should rightly worry about? Perhaps life is absurd and that is actually a good thing. This is what Thomas Nagel argues in a paper on the topic, published in 1971.[1]

Nagel begins his investigation by ruling out the usual suspects. What makes life absurd is not the fact that what matters to us now will most likely not matter anymore at some time in the future (say, in a million years), because we have no good reason to think that the things that matter to us now would matter more or would only really matter if they also mattered in the future. Also, if what happens now does not matter in the future, then surely what happens in the future does not matter now. Consequently, it does not matter now whether what matters now will also matter in the future.

Neither is what makes life absurd the fact that we will die, or the fact that we are very small and insignificant when compared to the enormous size of the universe. If our life is absurd (i.e. meaningless) now, then it would also be absurd if we lived considerably longer or forever, or if we were actually big enough to fill the universe. Nor is life absurd because it will be cut off at some point and in that sense does not lead anywhere. What we do in life does in fact lead to many things in life. Why should it have to lead to something that is no longer part of our life? The chain of justifications (‘I do this in order to achieve that’) needs to come to an end somewhere, and there is no reason why it should not come to an end within our given life span.

From this it does, of course, not follow that life is not absurd. What follows is merely that if life is absurd, it must be something else that makes it so. Nagel suggests that we normally call a situation absurd if there is a “conspicuous discrepancy between pretension or aspiration and reality” (31). You are being knighted and your pants fall down, that kind of thing. Accordingly, life as a whole would be absurd (for each one of us) if there were an inevitable clash between our pretensions as human beings and reality (or what we know about it). Now there is indeed such a clash, namely between our inability to take our life other than seriously and our inability, as thinking beings, not to understand the ultimate arbitrariness of everything we do. Among the animals, only humans have the ability to look at their own lives from, as it were, the outside, as mere spectators, or sub specie aeternitatis. If we adopt this “view from nowhere” (as Nagel shall later call it), then we realize that everything that is important to us is only important because we happen to be the kind of creature that we are. If we were different, then different things would matter to us. Nothing matters in itself. It is all contingent, and in that sense arbitrary. When we look at our lives from that perspective it seems rather ludicrous how seriously we take it all. And yet, seriously we do take it. We have to carry on with our lives and to continue to treat things as important that from an impartial spectator’s point of view are anything but. (I know it does not really matter whether I get that promotion or not, but knowing this does not change the fact that it still matters to me.) This inevitable conflict of perspectives is where absurdity lies: that we can be deeply involved in our lives and, at the same time and without undermining or diminishing our involvement in any way, realize that if we had been “put together” (35) differently we could just as well be involved in something else, or in nothing at all. In this respect, our sense of the absurd resembles epistemological scepticism: despite understanding perfectly well that I have no grounds to be certain about anything (for instance the existence of an external world or other minds), I cannot help continuing to act as if I was certain. Or rather, I am certain, although I know that, rationally speaking, I shouldn’t. Similarly, I take my life seriously, although I know that I have no rational grounds to do so.

However, something changes when we cultivate (rather than suppress) the external view on our lives: our seriousness is not gone (which would in fact be disastrous), but it is now “laced with irony”. (37) Should we regret this? For Nagel, the absurdity of (our) life is actually a good thing and not something we should bemoan or try to escape from. It is most definitely no reason to despair. Remember, it is only because we can look at our lives from the outside that life can appear absurd to us. We don’t really discover it to be absurd. If Nagel is right, then our lives are not absurd prior to our realizing this. The absurdity consists in the conflicting viewpoints. That is why the life of an animal is never absurd, precisely because it cannot be absurd for it. For an animal, say a mouse, life is never absurd because he lacks that crucial impartial perspective. He lacks the “self-consciousness and self-transcendence that would enable him to see that he is only a mouse.” (38) Yet is he better off because his life is not absurd? No. The animal’s life is not absurd, says Nagel, but it is not meaningful either. In fact, at the end of his paper Nagel comes very close to suggesting that it is actually the very fact that we have a sense of the absurdity of our lives that makes our lives meaningful. “I would argue”, he writes, “that absurdity is one of the most human things about us: a manifestation of our most advanced and interesting characteristics.” Our sense of the absurd is in fact “a way of perceiving our true situation” and a result of our “capacity to transcend ourselves in thought” (39). So nothing to worry about. (And anyway, Nagel rather glibly concludes, if nothing matters, then it does not, or should not, matter that nothing matters either.)

COMMENTARY:

I am wondering whether Nagel’s analysis of our sense that life is absurd does not rely rather too heavily on a redefinition of the absurd. Nagel’s absurd does not seem to be the absurd that people tend to be concerned about. When he begins his analysis he occasionally uses the term ‘meaningless’ synonymously with ‘absurd’, but when he reaches his conclusion, the absurd has mutated into something else that can no longer be equated with meaninglessness. No wonder then that Nagel does not find the absurd particularly bothersome. All it does is invite us to adopt a slightly ironical, moderately detached attitude towards life. We still take life seriously, but perhaps not that seriously anymore. We have distanced ourselves slightly from our individual persona, have gained a little freedom from ourselves and can now meet the world with a little more equanimity. That is all very useful and liberating, I’m sure. However, it does not really address the existential concerns that people sometimes have, about whether, when all is said and done, life is really worth all the trouble. Why bother if in the end it will all be for nothing? The worry that nothing might really matter is an existential worry, or, in Kierkegaard’s sense, an ethical worry. In contrast, Nagel’s absurd is purely aesthetic, more pleasurable than horrifying. It is indeed the product of the view from nowhere, the absurd of a pure spectator. Never mind that I am that spectator and what I am looking at is my own life, which I cannot help taking seriously. It is still from the spectator’s perspective that it appears absurd to me. It is the place where I can laugh about my struggles, where death is simply the end of a story that has been told before and will be told again, many, many times. But the absurd that bothers and alienates us, which might even drive us into despair, is something that is perceived not from the viewpoint of the spectator, but from the viewpoint of the one who actually lives that life. And who lives it here and now and only this once. Nagel’s absurd is harmless, even edifying, because it is perceived from the outside. It invites us to see the comical side of things. Yet there is also an absurd that is perceived from the inside, and that is a very different thing, something that does not liberate us from our natural obsession with ourselves, our inborn parochialism, but that instead rips a hole into our world and threatens to rob us of our sanity. Here be lions and dragons, here be cold and dark and emptiness. It is a different, far less congenial kind of absurd, one that is more akin to the absurd of Lovecraft and Ligotti than to that of Nagel.

One more thing: the notion of the absurd is very much associated with the French philosopher Albert Camus. Nagel mentions him, but only briefly and rather disparagingly at the end of his paper, only to accuse him of being a bit too “romantic and slightly self-pitying” (39). Instead of happily embracing the ironic detachment that the absurd can and should give rise to, Camus asked us to respond to the absurd with defiance, by “shaking a fist at the world”. This, however, is at best only partly true and a bit of a caricature. The absurd, for Camus, also rests on a discrepancy, but not between an internal and an external view, but between human hopes and desires on the one hand, and the unresponsiveness and indifference of the universe on the other. But what Camus thinks of as the appropriate response to this discrepancy amounts to more than just shaking one’s fist at the world. It is, rather, a determination not to accept the indifference with which the universe looks back at us, and to resist this indifference by not adding to it. We defy the absurd by insisting that it matters what we do, by making them matter, by caring about what happens and what is being done to other people, and by acting accordingly. We thus create, little by little, a different universe, one that does care, at least in part, because we do. In short, Camus’ absurd prompts us to care more, whereas Nagel’s absurd prompts us to care less.  

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[1] Thomas Nagel, “The Absurd”. Originally published in the Journal of Philosophy 68/20 (1971): 716-727. Reprinted in Life, Death and Meaning. Key Philosophical Readings on the Big Questions, ed. David Benatar, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield 2004, 29-40 (which is the version I have been using).

Richard Taylor on the Meaning of Life

Richard Taylor’s “The Meaning of Life”, published in 1970,[1] starts off with an analysis of the myth of Sisyphus, which Taylor introduces as a “perfect image of meaninglessness” (20). Sisyphus was condemned by the gods to push a rock up a hill, for all eternity. For whenever he gets to the top, the rock rolls down again, so that he has to start all over again. There is no hope that he will ever accomplish his task, and giving up is not an option. The “idiotic cycle” that is his life will never end.

There are two features that, for Taylor, makes the Sisyphus case such a perfect example of a meaningless life. The first is the repetitious nature of his labour, and the second is the fact that “nothing ever comes of what he is doing”. Taylor clearly gives more weight to the second feature, the pointlessness of his labour, suggesting that what someone is doing might be meaningful despite being repetitive, as long as it eventually leads to something, which in Sisyphus’s case it doesn’t. Equally, if one’s life were less repetitive, it would still be meaningless if nothing ever came of it. “Meaninglessness is essentially endless pointlessness, and meaningfulness is therefore the opposite.” (23)

Unfortunately, our own lives seem to be equally pointless. Like all living beings we tend to do the same things over and over again. Our days strongly resemble each other. We get up, use the bathroom, have breakfast, go to work, come home, eat, sleep, and then we do it again tomorrow. Our life as a whole is equally predictable in its overall trajectory. We get born, grow up, find a job, a hobby, fall in love, marry, have children, get old, retire, and die. And our children will do the same, as will their children after them, ad infinitum. There is some variation in the detail, of course, but in terms of their general features most human lives are pretty much alike. For one thing, they are characterized by endless repetitions, and for another, they do not seem to lead anywhere. Our lives are therefore just as pointless as the life of the famous rock-pusher. “The picture of Sisyphus is the picture of existence of the individual man, great or unknown, of nations, of the human race, and of the very life of the world.” (25)

Except it isn’t. As it turns out, this was only the first step in Taylor’s argument, which he subsequently turns completely around by flatly contradicting the equation between pointlessness (the not-going-anywhere of our lives) and meaninglessness that he initially seemed to accept. Pointless our lives may be, he now argues, but that does not necessarily mean that they are meaningless. Contrary to what was suggested before with the Sisyphus example, what makes them meaningful is not what comes of them (or that something comes of them), but the fact that we deeply care about what we do, that we are really emotionally involved in our lives. The things we do are important to us, and that is enough to make our lives meaningful, even if nothing that we do actually leads anywhere (at least to nothing permanent, nothing that will stay).

Why should we think that their ‘leading somewhere’ would make our lives meaningful anyway? Let us suppose that Sisyphus actually managed to fulfil his task. He rolls the rock up the hill, and it stays up. Sisyphus has accomplished his goal, and since there aren’t any other goals to replace this one (for instance to roll a different rock up the hill, which wouldn’t really change much), he now has got nothing left to do. His life has led to something, and that’s it. Would his life now be meaningful? Taylor insists (and quite plausibly so) that it would not. It would, instead, from the moment of his accomplishment onwards, be “the picture of infinite boredom” (26).

This has, according to Taylor, nothing to do with the fact that what he has achieved is unlikely to be regarded as something that is actually worth achieving. Having put a rock on top of a hill is perhaps not something one can be particularly proud of. Perhaps one should have better things to do. Yet even if we supposed that Sisyphus used his rocks to build a beautiful temple on top of that hill, then this would still not make his life any more meaningful. In both cases, the “nightmare of eternal and pointless activity” has now merely been replaced with “the hell of its eternal absence.” (26) And that particular form of meaninglessness, which according to Taylor would be a genuine hell (27), is precisely what our lives normally do not have because we, together with all other living beings, tend to feel an “inner compulsion to be doing just what we were put here to do, and to go on doing it forever.” This, Taylor, suggests, “is the nearest we may hope to get to heaven”. (27) It is also what makes our lives meaningful. The meaning is in the (passionate) doing of things, not in what that doing leads to. “The point of living is simply to be living, in the manner that it is your nature to be living.” (28) We need to look at lives not from an external point of view, but from within, and then we will see that the endless activity that leads nowhere, which characterizes life, is, simply because it is energetically pursued, perfectly sufficient to give meaning to life. Consequently, even Sisyphus would, according to Taylor, have a meaningful life (and one that would not be in any way less meaningful than any other life) if he actually loved rolling rocks up hills. So if we could implant in him “a strange and irrational impulse; namely a compulsive impulse to roll stones” (22), then his life would be just as good as ours and just as good as any life can ever be.

I am inclined to agree with Taylor’s overall conclusion that the meaning of life is to be found in the living of it, and that the fact that our lives are in many ways repetitive and ultimately ‘do not lead anywhere’ (i.e. end in death), does not make our lives any less worth living. As long as we love doing what we do, as long as we are, as Taylor says, deeply involved, our lives are meaningful in that sense. In that sense even animals can have a meaningful life. As long as my dog still feels “the rapture of bones under hedges” (William James), her life is as meaningful as it can get. However, I still have a few qualms about the argument.

First, Taylor depicts the situation where something actually has come of what we do as the end of all possible pursuits. We achieved our life goal, and now we are done. Nothing left to live for. Pure hell. Okay, fine. However, that is not what we desire when we feel that our life is not going anywhere, or that nothing comes of it. Why should there be only one concern in our life, or a limited number of concerns? We want our life to go somewhere, but we don’t want to reach the point where it no longer goes anywhere. We want it to keep going somewhere. That seems to me entirely consistent. The question would then be, Is my life better (more meaningful) if what I am doing actually has a point (say, by changing the world, if only for a while, for the better) than if it does not?

Also, Taylor is suggesting it doesn’t matter at all what we do as long as we are really into it. In terms of what makes life meaningful, endless rock pushing is just as good as, say, curing cancer (which echoes Bentham’s claim that pushpin is just as good as poetry: whatever works for you). This has a certain democratic appeal, which I do appreciate, but I am wondering whether Taylor is not taking the democratization a bit too far. Does it really not matter at all what we take a keen interest in? Would Sisyphus’s life really suddenly become meaningful if we managed to manipulate him in such a way that he wants nothing more than pushing that damn rock up the hill? And if that completely satisfied him? Should we then also say that if we could create humans who are more than happy to be our slaves, then they too would have meaningful lives? What about conscious, self-aware sex robots whose only purpose in life is to satisfy our every desire? Or “pigs that want to be eaten” (Baggini)? From the internal perspective their lives might appear worth living, but looked at from the outside it is difficult not to find them somehow deficient, even lamentable. And the fact that those who live them don’t mind living that way, and even positively relish their situation, does not make it any better. If anything, it makes it worse. The happy Sisyphus is an abomination.

This may have something to do with the obvious unnaturalness of those lives. There is something obnoxious about making a living being enjoy a life that is forced upon it and that it would never choose for itself if it had a choice. Taylor finds the meaning of life in the “inner compulsion to be doing just what we were put here to do, and to go on doing it forever”. The way this is phrased, however, is puzzling, and certainly ambiguous. What exactly does it mean to say that we have been “put here to do” something? Who put us here? And does anything depend on our being put here to do something? And if so, does anything depend on who put us here to do whatever we are meant to do? What if we have not been put here at all, or not put here to do anything in particular?

It may well be, though, that Taylor was just a bit careless with his formulation and that all he meant to say is that a life is meaningful if the one who lives it can do what is in their nature to do, and pursue the goals that is in their nature to pursue. Would we then be prepared to say that it is in Sisyphus’s nature to push rocks up hills, in the sexbot’s or sexual slave’s nature to want to be sexually abused, and in the pig’s nature to be eaten, provided they have been designed to enjoy this? Would it be different if they hadn’t been designed that way, but had just turned out to be appreciative of those things through an accident of nature? If they just happened to be born that way?

And what about those blind, ugly worms living in dark caves that Taylor mentions earlier in the paper to illustrate the apparent pointlessness of existence, unmoving and doing nothing except occasionally eating an insect that gets stuck to them, reproducing once, and then dying? Is that really more or less what we do? Is that really all that we are? Are our lives not in any significant way different from that of those worms? Meaningful perhaps, if we go along with Taylor’s assessment, but only as meaningful as the life of such worms? It doesn’t feel right. More importantly, it does not feel like we are getting an awful lot of meaning out of this, and certainly not the kind of meaning that would justify and support the exaltation with which Taylor concludes his essay, declaring that the meaning of life (which we share with those worms) “far exceeds in both its beauty and permanence any heaven of which men have ever dreamed or yearned for.” (28) I’m not sure that blind, ugly worms in a cave can carry the weight of such exaltation.

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[1] Originally in Richard Taylor, Good and Evil, New York: Macmillan 1970, reprinted in Life, Death and Meaning. Key Philosophical Readings on the Big Questions, ed. David Benatar, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield 2004, 19-28 (which is the version I have been using).

William James on Donald Trump

I just stumbled across the following passage in an address that William James gave in 1897 on the occasion of the unveiling of the Robert Gould Shaw monument in Boston. In the light of recent developments in the United States, I thought I should share it as a particularly apt comment on what we are witnessing today and what, somehow, inexplicably, we have allowed to let happen.

“The deadliest enemies of nations are not their foreign foes, they always dwell within their borders. And from these internal enemies civilization is always in need of being saved. The nation blest above all nations is she in whom the civic genius of the people does the saving day by day, by acts without external picturesqueness; by speaking, writing, voting reasonably; by smiting corruption swiftly; by good temper between parties; by the people knowing true men when they see them, and preferring them as leaders to rabid partisans or empty quacks.”

(William James, Memories and Studies, London/ Bombay/ Calcutta: Longmans, Green and Co. 1911, 58)