The idea that life is meaningless in itself is an existential and metaphysical position a nihilistic one at that, which contributes to despair. “]The collapse of Western values and traditions has led, as philosopher A.C. Grayling puts it, to the nihilistic view that “life has no point, the world has no value, there is no purpose worth pursuing, and there is nothing that I want to be.” Grayling’s remedy? “So it’s up to you.”
In a single glib utterance Grayling unwittingly denies and dismisses the entire enterprise of philosophy. It’s the job of philosophers to discover and create meaning. Of course, if there is no meaning to discover, as Grayling maintains, then philosophy itself has no meaning. And if everyone must be a philosopher, then no one actually is.
Never in the history of civilization has philosophy been more necessary to the human prospect. But at the same time never has the endeavor of philosophy been so misconstrued, including by ‘professional philosophers.’
That doesn’t mean philosophy is an elitist activity, anymore than being an architect is. Few can be good architects, but good architects don’t belong to some special class of human beings.
To extend the metaphor, while it’s certainly true that we are all architects of our own lives within our own homes, few have the capacity, drive, and talent to design houses, much less great buildings like Bilbao in Spain.
Grayling goes on to say, “trying to think about waking up every day…adopting a posture of despair and negativity in this universalizing kind of way…but then to get up and pay your taxes and get in a bus and the rest of it seems to be a kind of lived paradox.”
I don’t know whether that is an example of British understatement, or a misunderstanding of the difference between paradox and contradiction. But it certainly echoes a common sentiment of the day, which, as Grayling evocatively describes it, is deeply nihilistic. (Nihilism arising from the belief that there is no objective truth.)
[captionpix imgsrc=”https://thecostaricanews.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/meditation2.jpg” align=”right” captiontext=”When Grayling says, watching birds has value because of the effect it has on us, he’s expressing the worn-out idea that man is the measure of all things.”]Part of the ‘job description’ of a philosopher is to resolve contradictions and reveal paradoxes. The former engenders conflict and suffering, while the latter elicits appreciation and wonder. Obviously that can’t be done if contradiction and paradox are made synonymous.
That said, and substituting ‘contradiction’ for ‘paradox,’ Grayling rightly points out that to take such an existential attitude is “certainly not a viable life position.”
But then he goes a bridge too far when he says, “OK, the world is absurd…there’s nothing there to discover, to give meaning, so it’s up to you.”
He’s failing to make the simplest of distinctions–between the natural and the man-made worlds. Meaninglessness is inherent in the world as it has become, not in life as it is. The idea that life is meaningless in itself is an existential and metaphysical position–a nihilistic one at that, which contributes to despair.
Throughout most of human history, cultures were integrated totalities, seamless contexts of meaning. People didn’t divide the spiritual from the political, much less the personal from the collective. The entire context of meaning which anthropologists used to speak of in their encounters with strange cultures may have seemed incomprehensible to us, but they were coherent, cohesive, and commonsensical to people living in integrated and intact cultures.
Culture in the non-compartmental and anthropologically distinct sense is all but extinct in human experience, but that doesn’t mean that “the responsibility to create meaning” falls solely to the individual, much less that “there’s nothing to discover” where the meaning of life is concerned.
Human beings are both creators of meaning, and autonomous agents of cosmic discovery. The two go together, since discovery without creating meaning is irrelevant; and creating meaning without discovery is hollow.
Grayling’s prescription does not involve confronting nihilism, but making it more palatable, or “palliative,” as in “recognizing the profoundly palliative character of love, of the human affections and friendship.”
But it’s erroneous in my view for a philosopher to say, as Grayling does, “freedom is an agony.” Philosophers may have to pass through the agony of truth-seeking in giving birth to new meanings for society, but to say that each person has to do so equally is to make philosophy irrelevant. Our job is to make the passage to maturity and intelligence less painful for young people of this and succeeding generations. It’s not to make meaninglessness more “palliative.”
by Martin LeFevre for TheCostaRicaNews.com
