Joshua W. Seachris on Cosmic Futility and the importance of narrative endings

Does it matter how the universe ends? Should we be worried by the naturalistic, scientifically grounded expectation that in a few billion years our solar system comes to an end and all traces that will then still be left of our existence (if there are any) will disappear forever? Should it affect the way we look at our life now? Does it make what we do now any less meaningful? Our intuitions are divided on this one: on the one hand it seems preposterous to believe that something that is going to happen so far in the future can have any bearing on the meaning of our present lives. Why should it? We will, after all, long be gone by then. On the other, to think that whatever we do, whatever we achieve, whatever we change, whatever good we may bring about, in the long run none of it will have made any difference, may well make us wonder why we bother doing it in the first place. It seems pointless. Futile. And we don’t want our actions to be futile. Ideally, we want them to make a lasting impact. Otherwise, what is the point of living?

In his 2011 paper “Death, Futility, and the Proleptic Power of Narrative Ending”[1], Joshua W. Seachris calls this second intuition the staying-power intuition (SPI), which he defines as “the idea that, ceteris paribus, worthwhile, significant and meaningful things last.” (461)[2] Actions that have no lasting consequences are futile. Deep or cosmic futility is the futility that results from the presumed fact that, because of the way the world works, there is ultimately nothing that has any lasting consequences. But why do we have this intuition in the first place: that only what lasts is meaningful? Seachris argues that the naturalistic assumption that we are making when we consider the meaning of our lives threatened or undermined by the way we think the world is going to end can and should be understood as a narrative or “meta-narrative”. In narratives, it always matters how they end. When we assess a story – emotionally, morally, aesthetically – the ending is particularly relevant. It not only matters to us what happens at the end, but also that it happens at the end. A bad ending is bad, just as a bad beginning is bad, but a bad ending is much worse than a bad beginning, precisely because it is a bad ending. It is the “narrative ending qua ending”, which “is salient in our broadly normative assessments of narratives as a whole”. (462) A lot of sad things can happen in the course of a narrative, but they don’t necessarily make the story as a whole a sad one. Yet a sad ending always makes for a sad story, and a happy ending for a happy story. “The ending relevantly frames the entire story.” (464) Cosmic futility is a threat because we look at life as a whole from a narrative perspective. If we didn’t – if we didn’t care so much about how things end -, we would not feel that our lives can be rendered worthless by what happens or does not happen in the far future of the world, seemingly nullifying all the good things that are actually happening in the present, all our accomplishments and achievements.

Of course whatever happens in the future, none of it can affect what has already happened. What we have accomplished, we have accomplished. If we have changed the world for the better, we have changed it for the better, at least for a while. Nothing is going to change that. Happy moments will still be happy moments even they don’t last, and they will forever remain happy moments. The past is what it is. It cannot be changed by the future. However, what we know or believe about the future can change how we understand and evaluate what is happening in the present. If you knew that your marriage was going to end in an acrimonious divorce, then whatever joy you might still experience would most likely be tainted and devaluated by your knowledge of the impending bad ending. Similarly, if we know or believe that humanity will one day disappear from the world without leaving a trace, then that is likely to make a difference to us now. Because endings matter. If they did not, cosmic futility would not be an issue. This is why the theist has an advantage over the naturalist. A theistic meta-narrative promises a happy ending. It promises an ending that gives lasting significance to our lives, and that promise may make a considerable difference to how we view our lives now.

The fact that for the theist life never really ends at all (because the theistic meta-narrative promises immortality), poses no serious obstacle to a narrative assessment. A narrative ending need not be a termination. It can also be closure. Ending as closure does not require that everything come to an end, but only that “a conflict or a series of conflicts that have arisen over the course of the narrative” (468) be resolved. The ending is contextual rather than absolute. The living-happily-ever-after formula stands for such an ending, which is all that is needed for the narrative appraisal of a life. This is because the life that we are worried about is this life, “with all its pain, suffering, and hardship” (468), which would be concluded and happily resolved in an after-life of eternal bliss.

COMMENTARY:

A few thoughts, the first relating to the nature of futility: it seems to me that for our actions to be futile it is not sufficient that they have no lasting consequences. It all depends on whether we want them to be lasting and how lasting we want them to be. Generally speaking, futile is an action whose intended goal is not accomplished. Accordingly, we cannot judge whether an action is futile or not if we don’t know what goal it was intended to accomplish. If what I intend to accomplish by doing something is completely unrelated to the eventual fate of the universe, then what I am doing is not rendered futile by said fate. If I study hard to become a decent philosopher, then my labours have not been futile if I manage to become a decent philosopher as a result, not even if the whole solar system will perish in a few billion years, because that has got nothing to do with it. Seachris seems to agree with this understanding, suggesting that in order for an action to be futile, one must aim at some desired end that then proves impossible to attain (471). It follows that “in the case of the futility that is sometimes thought to characterize life in a naturalistic universe, the futility is largely a function of the discrepancy between our deepest desires and the nature of the naturalistic world which seems to ultimately prevent theses desires from being realized.” (472) However, this seems to presuppose that we do have a deep desire that what we do now will have an impact far beyond our own life span and even beyond the life span of our solar system. Is that really so? I may have some desire to be remembered after my death, mostly by my loved ones, and perhaps by others, for a while at least. But do I have a deep desire to still have an impact on things a few billion years from now? I cannot detect this desire in me, and it would seem a very odd desire to have.

Even if my desires are more far-reaching, more world-changing in their ambition, I doubt that we would seriously expect or even hope to make an everlasting impact. Let us say that I can make the world a better place in some way, and I also desire to do so, but that at the same time I am aware that it is not going to last. The world will only be better for a while. Would my plan, in that case, not be worth pursuing at all? Or would I at least feel that it would not be worth pursuing? No doubt, it would certainly be better if the world remained a better place, and the longer it remained a better place the better it would be, but from that it doesn’t follow that being a better place only for a while is not better than never to have been a better place at all. I don’t see why the impossibility to make any state of affairs last should make it pointless to help this state of affairs come about.

Still, we do want things to last, or more precisely we want the good things to last, as long as it is possible for them to last without ceasing to be good. And yes, endings do matter to us. Seachris connects our desire for good things to last with our preference for good endings over bad endings and our preference for good endings over good beginnings (or middles), and sees the former founded in the latter. I am wondering, however, granted that there is indeed a connection between these two intuitions, can we really be sure which comes first? Do we want things to last because endings matter (as Seachris suggests), or do endings matter to us because we want things (or at any rate the good things) to last? Consider: if an ending is good, then the good is going to last because it is that with which everything has ended. If it is indeed an ending, then we don’t have to fear that things will turn bad again. If, on the other hand, the ending is bad, then the good has not lasted and there is no chance that things will change: there is no hope that the good is ever going to come back because the story has ended. As long as the story has not ended, there is always a chance for things to change. So if we want the good things to last, then it is easy to see why endings often matter so much to us.  

Normally, however, endings matter to us only to the extent that they are an integral part of particular desires. To convince us that endings matter, Seachris uses the example of a romantic relationship. Clearly if I knew now that my relationship was going to end badly it would change the way I feel about it. It would lose part of its meaning and would appear pretty pointless, but only if I expected and wanted it to last. That is normally the case when we fall in love with someone. If I love I cannot help feeling or at least hoping that my love will last. If it does not, then my love wasn’t really what I thought it was. If my marriage ends in divorce my marriage has failed because it in my mind was meant to last, not forever, but perhaps “until death do us part”. There are hopes and expectations connected to being involved in a romantic relationship with someone, especially if it ends in marriage, which is yet another beginning: a beginning of something that can, once again, end well or badly. The end of a love affair, and perhaps even more so the dissolution of a marriage is a sad ending to an (for those involved) exciting story, but the eventual disappearance of all life from the face of the Earth is not really a sad or bad end at all, certainly not for us, if only because we never expected, nor had any reason to expect, that it would last forever.

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[1] First published in Religious Studies 47 (2011): 141-163. Reprinted in: Exploring the Meaning of Life. An Anthology and Guide, Chichester: John Wiley 2013, 461-480.

[2] Seachris points out that there is also a second rival intuition, the “scarcity intuition”, according to which what we do is meaningful precisely because things will not last.

Galen Strawson against Narrativity

In his paper “Against Narrativity” (in Real Materialism and Other Essays, Oxford: Clarendon Press 2008), Galen Strawson attacks two common views: the descriptive claim that we typically experience our life as some kind of narrative or story (aka the ‘psychological Narrativity thesis’) and the related, but logically independent normative claim that a truly good human life requires such a narrative outlook (aka the ‘ethical Narrativity thesis’). Both claims, Strawson holds, are actually false because there are in fact “deeply non-Narrative people and there are good ways to live that are deeply non-Narrative.”

According to Strawson, there are two types of people, those who experience their self as being extended in time and those who do not. Both are perfectly normal, and both can equally flourish as human beings. The former simply have a diachronic self-experience, and the latter an episodic one. Those with diachronic self-experience (the ‘diachronics’) falsely believe that everybody is like them, while in fact some (perhaps many) are not. As it happens, they are also mistaken about the true nature of the self. ‘Episodics’ have a better grasp of what the self actually, “as a matter of metaphysical fact”, is, namely something momentary, which is always just beginning (and presumably also always about to end). Obviously, episodics do not experience their life as a story (because in order to experience your life as a story, you need to experience your self as being extended over time). Only diachronics (though not necessarily all of them) do. How, then, do episodics experience their life?

Strawson identifies himself as an episodic. He thus can bear witness to what it is like to be one. Of course he is aware of having a past and a future, or more precisely, he is aware that the human being Galen Strawson has a past and a future. But he himself, or the self that he is, does not (despite remembering some of Galen Strawson’s past as if it had happened to himself, that is, from a first-person perspective). “I”, he confides, “have absolutely no sense of my life as a narrative with form, or indeed as a narrative without form. Absolutely none. (…) I have no significant sense that I – the I now considering this question – was there in the further past.” Strictly speaking, he writes, what happened to the human being Galen Strawson in the past (and I am assuming this includes GS’s actions) is not something that happened to him. In other words, my past self is not me. It’s another. (Perhaps that is what Rimbaud meant when he said “Je est un autre”.) If I know this, then I am an episodic. An episodic seems to be someone who is smart enough not to (falsely) identify with his previous and future incarnations.

Now several ethicists wrestling with the question what constitutes a good human life have suggested that in order to live a good, not only subjectively pleasant, but meaningful human life, we need to develop some understanding of our life as a whole by binding the various episodes of our life together into a coherent, unifying narrative. This is often being treated as pretty obvious. Strawson, however, denies that it is in any way necessary. On the contrary, he argues, “the best lives almost never involve this kind of self-telling.” Yet why exactly he thinks that is not entirely clear to me. My guess is that the reason for it is this: Strawson seems to (rather conventionally) assume that a truthful life is better than an untruthful one, and he believes that any attempt to view your life as a coherent whole is an attempt to blind yourself to what he calls the “truth of your being”. The more you build your self-conception on memory, which is notoriously unreliable, and the more you try to give yourself an identity by constructing a narrative of your life, the less likely you are to understand who and what you really are. Narrative self-articulation “almost always does more harm than good” because it is, “in general, a gross hindrance to self-understanding: to a just, general, practically real sense, implicit or explicit, of one’s nature.” So in short, a non-narrative life is more truthful and therefore (in this respect) better.

Strawson is willing to defy Socrates and with him, it seems, our entire philosophical tradition by suggesting that the unexamined life might actually be better than the examined life. That is quite an extraordinary and actually rather refreshing statement. Far from being deprived in some way, he says, “truly happy-go-lucky, see-what-comes-along lives are among the best there are, vivid, blessed, profound.” Better, in other words, to be a grasshopper singing through the summer than an ant worrying about the days to come. It is easy to see the attraction. Perhaps life can indeed be lived better if we are unburdened by the certainties of the past, and the uncertainties of the future. Until winter comes, of course (and winter always comes in the end), but that does not need to concern us because it won’t happen to us. We will long be gone then. Is that what Strawson means? I’m not entirely sure, but it sure sounds like it. Such a view on life does of course also have a place in our philosophical tradition. It ties in with Horace’s advice to “seize the day” (carpe diem) and the Stoic precept not to concern oneself with the things that one cannot control (which includes the past and the future). There is certainly some wisdom in this.

Yet there is another reason why I feel attracted to Strawson’s rejection of the ethical Narrativity thesis. That we need to give our life a coherent narrative shape in order to live a good (human) life is a claim that is usually made in the context of discussions about meaning in life (though Strawson does not mention meaningfulness at all in his paper – he just talks about the “good” life). A good human life, the standard argument goes, is more than just a happy (subjectively good, pleasurable) life. A happy life is not a good life if it is meaningless, and it cannot be meaningful without having (at the very least) some kind of narrative coherence. What bothers me about this argument and the whole discourse focusing on meaning in life is that is generally assumed that only human lives can be meaningful. Yet if only a meaningful life is a truly good life, then non-human animals cannot have a truly good life. In fact, if their lives are not meaningful, then they seem to be meaningless, and being meaningless is much the same as being pointless, which is much the same as being not worth living in the first place. But it seems to me that an animal’s life certainly is worth living and that it is not pointless, even though it may not have a point. Yet if an animal’s life is worth living without having a point and without being meaningful in any of the usual senses, then perhaps a human life can also be worth living without that. Strawson seems to suggest that it can, and I like that.

However, what I find problematic is the underlying metaphysical claim about the supposedly true nature of the self. It is difficult to see what truth it is that we fail to grasp when we experience ourselves as being extended in time and when we understand each episode of our lives as being connected to other, earlier and later, episodes in a narrative fashion. Perhaps all that Strawson means here is that, as diachronics, we fail to understand the true nature of selves in general (as opposed to the true nature of our own individual self) because we believe that our selves are temporally extended while in fact they are not. But I don’t think we can really know what the self is. Perhaps it does not even make sense to ask whether the self is in fact episodic or diachronic. Or perhaps the self is both, episodic and diachronic, in the sense that in some respect we are the same self that we were yesterday, and in other respects a new self is born at every new moment in time. It is, in any case, far from obvious, what the self really is, “as a matter of metaphysical fact”.

That episodics are better at understanding the nature of their individual selves is also rather unlikely because such an understanding would require self-reflection, and self-reflection is not possible without some kind of story-telling. After all, if Strawson is right, then the self on which I reflect is never the self that does the reflecting. It is always in the past and a different self, and that different self needs to be narratively constructed before it can be examined. But it is not only self-reflection that relies on story-telling. All perception is already the telling of a story. It is an activity where narrative decisions are being made: about who is playing the lead and who the supporting actors are, what is important and what is not, where things have come from and where they are heading, the (likely) causes and purposes of events and actions. Perceiving the world is already a way of making sense of it, and we make sense of things by constructing plots for them, by weaving them into a coherent storyline. You cannot perceive anything without that. In that sense we are all natural born story-tellers.

Another problem is that if I don’t identify with my future selves (which, according to Strawson, I shouldn’t if I can help it), then I have no good reason to make sure that my life (the life of Michael Hauskeller) will continue to go well. If I truly believe that those future selves of Michael Hauskeller are, despite appearances, not me, then what happens to those selves need not be of any concern to me (or at least not of more concern than what happens to the selves of other people). Yet if I don’t care what happens to my future selves, then the good life that I might be having now is unlikely to last very long.

We may also wonder what a determined episodic makes of moral feelings such as responsibility, guilt, shame, remorse, or gratitude, all of which only seem to make sense if I see myself as the same self that has done certain things in the past, and to whom certain things have happened. Do episodic selves not have those feelings, or do they regard them as misleading? Again, it is not completely absurd to think that we might actually be better off if we did not have those feelings. A guilt- and remorse-free existence has a certain appeal, but unless we are willing to accept that one needs to be a psychopath in order to live a truly good human life, we should probably reject the suggestion.