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)

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.