Filial Ingratitude

I've recently started to work on a book on (the virtue of) gratitude. One of the questions I intend to address is whether gratitude can actually be owed to someone, and if so, in what kind of situation exactly.

Take for instance the gratitude that a parent expects from their children. Filial ingratitude is one of the great topics of literature. Think of Shakespeare's King Lear, who gives his kingdom and all his power to his two daughters who swear they love him more than anything else in the world. But, predictably, as soon as they have got what they wanted, the erstwhile king becomes a bothersome old fool to them, neglected, abused, and despised. Lear, of course, bitterly complains about their "monstrous" ingratitude, which is seen as almost as bad as patricide, which in turn is seen as very bad indeed. Shakespeare suggests that what makes Regan and Goneril's ingratitude so abominable is not the fact that they are not properly grateful to Lear in his role as a benefactor (who has given them power and riches), but rather that they are not properly grateful to him as their father. Similarly, in Balzac's Pere Goriot, the title character is a once wealthy man who has literally given his last penny to his rich and spoilt daughters, who then cannot be bothered to visit him when he is dying and has only one wish, to see them one last time. He is buried like a pauper, his daughters nowhere to be seen. So this seems to be another clear case of filial ingratitude. But then again, it is the great sacrifices that Goriot makes for his daughters that prompt the reader to think of their ingratitude as monstrous. Would they appear any less monstrous if Goriot had not been their father? Perhaps, but why exactly? Is there a gratitude that they owe to their father for the simple reason that he is their father?

So the question is, do we owe our parents gratitude because we owe our existence to them? After all, we wouldn't be if not for them. However, even if we value our being alive, we didn't exactly ask anyone to give us life, and it is not clear that our parents have actually benefited us by bringing us into existence. You can benefit someone who exists, but not someone who doesn't exist. But if my existence as such is not something that I owe my parents gratitude for, perhaps I owe them gratitude for feeding me, providing a roof over my head, and not letting me die when I was too little to fend for myself. However, it may be argued that by bringing us into existence they have incurred a moral obligation to look after us until we no longer need them. It is they who owe us, rather than we who owe them (just as we owe our children, rather than they us). It all depends whether we think that children have a right to be fed and taken care off and even (as some philosophers have argued) to be loved. If there is such a right, then they don't owe gratitude to those who do nothing more than what is their moral duty.

So again, is there such a thing as filial ingratitude?

Human Solitude

I just reread Gabriel Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude, which I read first 25 years ago, when I was a student. Great book, but not exactly uplifting when we take the events in the book, which tells the story of seven generations of the Buendia family somwhere in South America, to be a description of the human condition. There seems to be little room for human choice, with every single character firmly in the grips of fate, repeating the same mistakes that their ancestors have made, engaging in the same follies, driven by instincts rooted in a common family character, as if the family were a Schopenhauerian idea, and its members only so many appearances of that idea, somehow lost in the material world, the world of becoming, as if they already were the ghosts as which many of them return after their death.

Not very surprisingly, given the title, the main theme or even main protagonist of the book is solitude, which is mentioned over and over again in various contexts and attributed to virtually all characters in the book. One of them, Fernanda, who marries into the family as a young woman and who initially is strong and independent, eventually finds herself worn down, not by life, but by the memory of her lost youth and everything that could have been and never was. And then Marquez or his narrator says a remarkable thing: "The need to feel sad was becoming a vice as the years eroded her. She became human in her solitude." How depressing is that! To suggest that what makes us human is not our reason, or our indeterminacy, or our moral sense, or the knowledge of our mortality, or any of the other traditional definitions of the human, but the existential condition of solitude. It suggests that we are always essentially alone, even when we're with others, even when we love and are being loved. That we were born alone and that we will die alone. And that we are deluding ourselves if we think that there is ever a time when we are not.

There is, of course, some truth in that. On the other hand, our human solitude is rooted in our apartness, our natural detachment from the world, which goes along with self-awareness, and it seems to me that the same detachment also allows us to love and befriend others, to feel compassion for and solidarity with them, to empathise. By virtue of our solitude we recognize each other for what we are. And perhaps it is that recognition that gives rise to what we call human dignity.

Philosophy and the Meaning of Life

I've been listening again to a radio interview I did some years ago. It was one of those programmes where listeners could ask questions. One of the questions was what I thought the meaning of life was. My reaction was to laugh and then to say that I was sorry, but that I couldn't answer this question because it was "too big" for me. I think I was rather amused by the public's persistent belief that what philosophers do is think about the meaning of life. Because that is, of course, not at all what we do. Now, however, listening to that broadcast again, I suddenly felt slightly ashamed of myself and actually of my whole profession. Why shouldn't people expect a philosopher to think about the meaning of life and to have, as a result, some, however tentative, answer to the question? This is, after all, why most of us start to ask philosophical questions in the first place, isn't it? It is the question that is at the heart of the whole philosophical enterprise. How odd then that professional philosophers shy away from this question and tend to make fun of people who ask it. It is a kind of intellectual cowardice, as if we had given up hope that this crucial question could ever be answered, or we were afraid of the kind of answer that we might find if we only looked hard enough. So it seems to me now that we shouldn't try to avoid this question, but on the contrary tackle it directly and do our best to find an answer. What does it all mean? I have no idea, but I'm determined to find out.

Animal Research - Cruel or Brave?

A new animal research facility was opened last Friday at the University of Leicester, UK. On Saturday, the left-wing British newspaper "The Guardian" printed a comment by Fiona Fox, the director of the Science Media Centre and, bizarrely, a former leading member of the Revolutionary Communist Party. The article was titled "Brave, not cruel, science". In it, Fox reminisces about the bad old days, only a decade ago, when animal researchers were demonized and openly attacked for torturing and killing animals in the name of science and human interest. The opening of Leicester's new research facility is a good sign, though. It gives hope that things are finally changing for the better. For too long, Fox feels, scientists have let themselves be so intimidated by animal rights activists and an all too gullible public that they didn't dare to pursue their work openly and to state the obvious, namely that animal research is absolutely necessary and a wonderful thing really. Scientists should be proud of what they are doing because they fight the terrible diseases that haunt humankind. Brave they are and honourable, modern heroes, knights in shining armour, and not cruel at all: "I know many scientists who work on animals. They are not motivated by cruelty but by a powerful desire to push the frontiers of medical research and develop therapies for debilitating diseases. Each one of these scientists is proud of the work they do and, like Leicester University yesterday, they are starting to show that pride to the world."

Now, I'm sure that most scientists who use and kill animals for their research are honourable people, and not, by nature, cruel. But that doesn't mean that their actions are not cruel or morally beyond suspicion. People can do very cruel things without being motivated by cruelty. It is well known that many Nazis who committed atrocities or allowed them to happen were not motivated by cruelty, but rather by a twisted sense of duty. Nazi scientists also used and expended lives in the name of science and progress. In their case those lives happened to be those of fellow humans. Some of the results of that research have actually proven valuable and may even have saved lives. But that doesn't mean that the research was morally justified, and that those scientists were "brave" and that they ought to have been proud of what they were doing, although I'm sure that many of them were.

My point is not that torturing humans to death in the name of science and the greater good is not worse than torturing animals to death for the same reasons. Perhaps it is, and perhaps it isn't. My point is rather that the motivation of the researchers is beside the question. Nor is it relevant whether the ends that are being pursued are worth pursuing or not, unless we are convinced that certain ends justify any means that we might have to use to secure those ends. It is not enough to be convinced that those scientists are good people and that they want only the best for us. We still need to ask whether what they are doing is right, whether we are justified in letting certain things be done to animals, no matter for what reason.

How the Good can be Worse than the Bad

I'm trying to finish a paper that I started a while ago and have not been working on for a while. I don't normally do that. What is different this time, is that I'm struggling to find a solution to the problem that I intended to solve, which is the following: let's say we could make people morally good by applying some simple device, like a morality pill: you swallow it and then you will be free of all anti-social impulses and will never (want to) hurt anyone again. If we gave this pill to everyone, the world would be a much better place, wouldn't it? No crime, no racial killings, no child abuse, no rape and torture. We would all be good simply because we would be incapable of evil. Now what is the problem with that, if any? The problem is that some people, including me, have this weird intuition that something important would be lost in a world in which people were incapable of doing anything bad. As if the very freedom to do terrible things to other human beings were more precious than the state of being good. What I haven't quite figured out yet is why exactly that freedom should be regarded as so precious that it is better to allow the occasional atrocities that humankind is prone to committing than to be without it. My intuition is that it has something to do with human identity and dignity, with the way we understand ourselves, as free agents and moral subjects, as ends rather than means to an end (even if that end is morality itself, or a world without human-caused pain). But at the moment my grasp and understanding of this is fuzzy at best. Has anyone got an idea? Or am I completely on the wrong track when I feel that there is a problem here?

Ray Bradbury on the Real Happiness Machine

Here's another story by Bradbury that I liked. It's called "The Happiness Machine" and it is, I think, about the ordinariness of happiness. Happiness is often thought of as a state of exaltation, or at least some kind of subjective, positive feeling that is desirable in its own right. It is decidedly not normal, out of the ordinary, something to be desperately sought and, when found, jealously guarded. We commonly feel that in order to be happy, we need to be able to enjoy all the good things in life, need to be healthy and fit, young and beautiful and reasonably well-to-do. Then we can rush off, from highlight to highlight and pursue happiness to all those fancy places where it is to be found (or, more likely, to be bought).

This assumption is shared by the protagonist in Bradbury's story. His name is Leo Auffmann, and he has set his mind to construcing a "happiness machine". Finally, after having tirelessly worked on it for some months or so, all the while completely neglecting his wife and children and his own health, he has a result, the machine is finished and it's working. However, to his dismay his wife is not the least interested in the machine, which, in her view, has almost ruined her husband's life, not to speak of their relationship: "Man was not made to tamper with such things. It's not against God, no, but it sure looks like it's against Leo Auffmann. Another week of this and we'll bury him in his machine!" And what's all this artifical happiness good for anyway, she asks, and flatly refuses even to give it a try. "If you died from overwork, what should I do today, climb in that big box down there and be happy?" Then his son uses it and is utterly miserable as a result. Leo doesn't understand. And then his wife finally gives in and decides that she will, after all, try out the machine. We hear her voice from inside. Apparently she sees and hears and smells wonderful places, Paris, Rome, the Pyramids, feels herself to be dancing (not really, of course), gasps "Amazing!", and then - she starts to weep. It's the saddest thing in the world, she says when she comes out. She had never missed any of this, and now she does. Now she wants do see Paris, but knows that she can't and won't. The machine let her feel young again, but she knows she isn't. It's all a lie. Nothing of it is real. The happiness machine is in fact a sadness machine. The problem is that we have to go back to reality, and reality is not like that: there are dirty dishes to be washed, beds to be made, children to be fed.

Moreover, it is not even desirable to have those wonderful experiences all the time and whenever you want to: "let's be frank, Leo, how long can you look at a sunset? Who wants a sunset to last? Who wants perfect temperature? Who wants air smelling good always? So after a while, who would notice? Better, for a minute or two, a sunset. After that, let's have something else." "Sunsets we always liked because they only happen once and go away." When Leo replies that this is actually very sad, this briefness, the ephemeral nature of the good, she says: "No, if the sunset stayed and we got bored, that would be a real sadness."

Then, the machine catches fire and they let it burn until it is no more. They can now go back to their lives, which are very ordinary, but not so bad after all, to "putting books back on shelves, and clothes back in closets, fixing supper" and ordinary things like that. And then Leo finally discovers "the real Happiness Machine", which is a life that is shared with other people, doing everyday things, and being there for each other. Nothing more is needed: "There sat Saul and Marshall, playing chess at the coffee table. In the dining room Rebecca was laying out the silver. Naomi was cutting paper-doll dresses. Ruth was painting water colors. Joseph was running his electric train. Through the kitchen door, Lena Auffmann was sliding a pot roast from the steaming oven. Every hand, every head, every mouth made a big or little motion. You could hear their faraway voices under glass. You could hear someone singing in a high sweet voice. You could smell bread baking, too, and you knew it was real bread that would soon be covered with real butter. Everything was there and it was working."

Ray Bradbury on Life and Death

I've been reading The Stories of Ray Bradbury lately, published in Everyman's Library, and I'm almost through. They make wonderful bedtime reading, and in several of them you can discover a whole philosophy of life. One of the stories that I liked most is called "The Leave-Taking". It is very short and not really much of a story at all. What happens is that an old woman dies. One day she decides that enough is enough and she lies down and stops living. Not that her life is bad in any way. She lives with her extended family, seems to be well-loved and cared-for, and loving and caring herself. She has had a good life, and is still having one. But that does not cause her to cling to her life as long as possible, as we might expect. On the contrary. It is the reason why she finds it easy to go. She has seen everything worth seeing, done everything worth doing, and it's simply time to go:

"Now it was as if a huge sum in arithmetic were finally drawing to an end. She had stuffed turkeys, chickens, squabs, gentlemen, and boys. She had washed ceilings, walls, invalids, and children. She had laid linoleum, repaired bicycles, wound clocks, stoked furnaces, swabbed iodine on ten thousand grievous wounds. Her hands had flown all around about and down, gentling this, holding that, throwing baseballs, swinging bright croquet mallets, seeding black earth, or fixing covers over dumplings, ragouts, and children wildly strewn by slumber. She had pulled down shades, pinched out candles, turned switches, and - grown old. Looking back on thirty billion of things started, carried, finished and done, it all summed up, totaled out; the last decimal was placed, the final zero swung slowly into line. Now, chalk in hand, she stood back from life a silent hour before reaching for the eraser."

When her decision to die becomes known to the family, her grandchildren try to change her mind - they need her, will miss her, don't want to be without her - she insists that there's nothing to be sad about. It's like watching too many movies in a row: "when the time comes that the same cowboys are shooting the same Indians on the same mountaintop, then it's best to fold back the seat and head for the door, with no regrets and no walking backward up the aisle. So, I'm leaving while I'm still happy and still entertained." And anyway, she says, she's not really leaving. It's only a small and insignificant part of her that will disappear. As we don't mourn a clipped fingernail, we shouldn't mourn the passing of a person, because a person is also only a part of a larger whole, which persists even when that particular person is gone, just like the body lives on when it loses some of its cells to be replaced by others. "Important thing is not the me that's lying here, but the me that's sitting on the edge of the bed looking back at me, and the me that's downstairs cooking supper, or out in the garage under the car, or in the library reading. All the new parts, they count. I'm not really dying today. No person ever died that had a family." It seems to me, though, that even without a family, without children, we can see our individual selves as being parts of a greater, more encompassing self, which lives on and in which we live on even when "we" are dead. The self is not fixed. It doesn't have clearly defined boundaries. It depends on where I see myself ending. I can see myself in you, can identify myself with the whole human community (or even the community of living beings). I can feel one with the universe, and then there's no reason to fear my own death because I will live on in others.

Bradbury's story ends with the death of the old woman, but her death is like a home-coming. It is described as if life had been a brief interruption from something else, something at least equally good: "A long time back, she thought, I dreamed a dream, and was enjoying it so much when someone wakened me, and that was the day when I was born." Now she is trying to pick up the thread of that dream, and then she finds it. "'It's all right,' whispered Great-grandma, as the dream floated her. 'Like everything else in this life, it's fitting.'" And with this glorious trust in the fittingness of all things, of life and death, the story ends.