The Emptiness and Transience of Life
In despair, seeing all his plots unravelling, his machinations brought to nothing, Shakespeare's Macbeth declares life to be empty and transient:
Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. (Act 5, scene 5).
Human achievements are rare. Repeated failure and continuing struggle are much more common than success, which fleeting at best, and ease, which is hardly ever attained, until death renders it all of no account either way. ‘Everyone in the graveyard votes the same,’ sang Christy Moore. Such achievements as there may be are soon emptied of significance as they quickly fade with the ephemerality of all things. That transience need not be tragic. Macbeth’s ambitions may well have been worthless in themselves, even had they succeeded. Further, a life that is without limits would lose its point, purpose, and coherence through stretching out to infinity, all endless possibility and limitless choice, with no reason to favour one direction rather than another – to be all things whilst becoming nothing. Finitude is one of the essential preconditions for fulfilment – only something with limits can be fulfilled.
The Macbeth speech is not a philosophical statement on the inherent meaningless of life but a rage and a protest delivered in the face of thwarted ambitions. Whatever Macbeth’s outburst of resentment, some plans need to be thwarted. As Macbeth goes down, he seeks to take history and the meaning of life with him. That the statement is riddled with hypocrisy and self-contradiction makes it perfect for the modern age, an age of self-importance and self-aggrandisement imploding from within through internal collision. If there is no point or purpose to life and history, then to whom or what is Macbeth appealing? If there is nothing, then protest is as futile as crying. The position is absurd, addressing a departed God as the idiot author of wretched fate without possibility of fulfilment. Macbeth’s life is meaningless precisely because it is an act, a performance, based on ambitions that bend reality out of shape, employing words that have no more substance than hot air. It is Macbeth’s tale that is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing that is rooted in real life.
Quite possibly, however, Shakespeare anticipated the nominalist madnesses of the self-creating, self-authoring moderns seeking to project their own meaning existentially on an objectively meaningless reality.
Nietzsche’s proclamation 'God is dead' asserts the loss of an overarching and authoritative moral framework which is grounded in a reality which possesses a substantive, inherent meaning. In this conception, ‘God’ is the ultimate reality conferring value, meaning, purpose, and direction upon life and history. Once God is removed, an interpretative anarchy is unleashed upon the world. There are no facts, Nietzsche argued, only interpretations – and perspectives driven by power and projection. The result is an orgy of metaphysical destruction leaving human beings with themselves alone.
Nietzsche styled his nihilism as the gay or joyous science. His view, however, is based on an explicitly anti-realist pessimism. The Judaeo-Christian view is based on a cosmic optimism, holding that God created the Creation as an act of love, that the world is good, an intelligible to creatures of intelligence, such as human beings are having been made in God’s likeness.
If this view is denounced as a myth, a fantasy, and a fiction, then an interesting discussion opens up. The truth will set you free, argued Jesus Christ, a view which is firmly based on the cosmic optimism outlined above. The atheist view retains that optimism, but loses the sense of reality that goes with it. To put the point pejoratively, it loses the myth, the fantasy, and the fiction to give us a reality shorn not only of God but of inherent value, purpose, goodness, and direction. It gives us a reality and a nature that is not necessarily benign, let alone benevolent. If reality is ugly, then the truth about it will be ugly too, and it won’t lead to either freedom or happiness. Nietzsche uproots a whole lot more than God. 'Truth is ugly', he writes in The Will to Power.
“It is disgraceful for a philosopher to say: the good and the beautiful are one; if he adds 'also the true', one ought to beat him. Truth is ugly. We possess art lest we perish of the truth.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 1975, 435
Nietzsche removes the foundations from underneath objectivity and rationalism, both science and ethics, Nature and God. Such observations undermine the rationalism of the Enlightenment, including Freud’s complacent view that religious illusion will be dispelled by the continuing advance of science. (Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion 1927). To be fair to Freud, however, his view is not optimistic, far from it. He recognises the extent to which fantasy, misperception, and a repression of the Real are not mere accidents to be removed by scientific reason, but are constitutive of the self. If these things are illusions then they are necessary illusions which human beings need to survive a reality which is not only not finely tuned to human needs, may well be inimical to them. ‘Fate, up against your will,’ as the line from ‘The Killing Moon’ has it. Human beings survive by way of the saving fictions they invent. That isn’t to deny that there is a true reality, there is: it just might be better for human beings if they didn’t know it. The presumption that discovering the truth about reality is something that is in the interests of human freedom and happiness or, more modestly, human survival, seems a legacy of the theological view, surviving the overthrow of God. People who argue that truth is better than illusion tend to assume that discovering the truth about reality is liberating in some way. Behind this assumption is a further assumption of the goodness of the world. Upon what is that assumption based? The claim could survive only in the more modest form of knowing reality is good for boosting your chances of survival, regardless of more nebulous claims with respect to freedom and happiness. But even that ducks the question – what if reality is so horrible that to look it squarely in the face would render us inert, like looking into the face of the Gorgon?
Reality may well be something so monstrous that the truth about it is simply unpalatable. Arthur Schopenhauer was a big influence on the early Nietzsche and it’s not hard to see why. Schopenhauer has a bleak view of life and reality as the passing product of the Will, an irresistible, implacable force. If there is intentionality to the Will, then it is one that serves no greater purpose than keeping itself in the game. The Will reproduces reality merely to reproduce itself, albeit to absolutely no end whatsoever. As purely self-determining, this Will has its end entirely in itself, not in a reality that is simply uses for its own purposes. As such, it exists almost as a diabolic parody of God such as one finds in Dante’s Inferno, other than being active rather than inert. Whilst we tell ourselves that our lives have value and meaning, the truth is that we are merely the passive instruments of the Will's blind drive for self-reproduction. To succeed, the Will fools us into believing that our lives do indeed have meaning when they patently do not. Consciousness thus emerges as a mechanism of self-deception, allowing human beings to nourish the illusion of living in accordance with values and ends that are meaningful in relation to reality. The Will also fools us into thinking its appetites are also ours. Marxists are led to denounce ‘false consciousness’ in the attempt to extirpate ideology and the inverted, alienated reality that generates such ideology, but consciousness is necessarily false in Schopenhauer's understanding. Human consciousness is thus not the way to truth but a self-deception mechanism that serves to conceal the horrible truth about reality from us. Human beings are unable to stand a truth which makes clear the sheer pointlessness of human existence. Should we come to see the orgy of carnage and destruction that is human history without filters, we would surely see the utter futility of our lives and cease struggling for survival. To quote the last line of Kenneth Williams’ diaries before the great man committed suicide, ‘oh what’s the point!?’
For Schopenhauer, it is only self-deluded fools who could imagine that life was worth living. He thus made the mole forever digging away in search of something the symbol of the human search for meaning:
To dig strenuously with its enormous shovel-paws is the business of its whole life; permanent night surrounds it... what does it attain by this course of life that is full of trouble and devoid of pleasure? Nourishment and procreation, that is, only the means for continuing and beginning again in the new individual the same melancholy course. (Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation (New York, 1969), ii. 353-4).
Human beings will keep digging for meaning, but won’t find it, for the very reason it isn’t there. But in digging in hope, they may well succeed in keeping themselves going in teeth of a nature that couldn’t care less. The meaning is in the digging and in the delusion that the effort is all worthwhile. The entire human enterprise recorded in history is a tragi-comic error that ought to have been abandoned long ago in face of the charnel house of history. Only the self-deluded can find the will to carry on in face of incontrovertible fact and fate. The human story is one of an unrelenting wretchedness that shows no sign of abating in present society and culture. The moderns with all their reason, science, and technology are merely writing new chapters, maybe the final ones. Only those deceived by the cunning of the Will could find the strength to persist in hope of it all somehow making sense someday. As scathing as he is of the self-deception involved, Schopenhauer recognises it as a necessary delusion:
"Many millions, united into nations strive for the common good, each individual for his own sake; but many thousands fall sacrifice to it. Now senseless delusion, now intriguing politics, incite them to wars with one another; then the sweat and blood of the great multitudes must flow [...]. In peace industry and trade are active, inventions work miracles, seas are navigated, delicacies are collected from all the ends of the earth, the waves engulf thousands. All push and drive, some plotting and planning, others acting; the tumult is indescribable. But what is the ultimate aim of it all? To sustain ephemeral and harassed individuals through a short span of time, in the most fortunate case with endurable want and comparative painlessness (though boredom is on the lookout for this), and then the propagation of this race and of its activities. With this evident want of proportion between the effort and the reward, the will-to-live, taken objectively, appears to us from this point of view as a folly, or taken subjectively, as a delusion. Seized by this, every living thing works with the utmost exertion of its strength for something that has no value." (Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation (New York, 1969), ii. 347)
All that struggle, all that effort, and all to no worthwhile end! Schopenhauer exposes the utter futility of the human enterprise, the sheer pointlessness of the misery, the sacrifice, and the struggle:
"The futility and fruitlessness of the struggle of the whole phenomenon are more readily grasped in the…life of animals. The variety and multiplicity of their structural organization, the ingenuity of the means by which each is adapted to its element and to its prey, here contrasts clearly with the absence of any lasting final aim. Instead of this we see only momentary gratification, fleeting pleasure conditioned by wants, much and long suffering, constant struggle, bellum omnium, everything a hunter and everything hunted, pressure, want, need and anxiety, shrieking and howling; and this goes on in saecula saeculorum, or until once again the crust of the planet breaks." (Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation (New York, 1969), ii. 353-4).
If the bad guys don’t get you, then the good guys will, and it doesn’t matter which in any case.
I quote Schophenhauer at length here not because I agree with him – I don’t, he is the antithesis of my view of ‘rational freedom,’ a view I set out in Platonist-Aristotelian, Judaeo-Christian, and Hegelian-Marxist terms. Schopenhauer presents a cheerless challenge to all three ‘rational’ systems. But, like Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, he unsettles cosy and comforting conceptions of truth, reason, and reality. The truth will not necessarily set you free for the very reason that reality is not necessarily convergent with human freedom and happiness nor even with human survival. It may well be better for human beings to be rationalising beings deceiving themselves and other rather than rational beings confronting the unbearable truth of a pointless existence.
There is another reason why I entertain (if not exactly like) Schopenhauer’s views. He gives us no comforting illusions whilst giving reasons why such saving illusions are necessary. He gives us a joyless philosophy of lack and thwarted desire. His words make an awful lot of sense of my autistic experience of the world as a chaotic void, involving me having to create motivational meanings and establish reasons for connections with a reality, both physical and personal, outside of my own time and space.
Schopenhauer deflates the pomposity of beings who style themselves rational creatures pursuing worthy ends which they see as grounded in a meaningful reality. We may tell ourselves that human life has meaning but, Schopenhauer declares, ‘no-one has the remotest idea why the whole tragic-comedy exists, for it has no spectators, and the actors themselves undergo endless worry with little and merely negative enjoyment.’ (Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation (New York, 1969), i. 196).
Schopenhauer’s views would seem to undermine the rationalist-scientistic view of the universe much more than the religious view, for the reason that all that the former has in its support is the physical and the truth about it. For Schopenhauer, that truth reveals futility and pointlessness, longings doomed never to be satisfied, a ceaseless Darwinian struggle with no point other than staying in the struggle until inevitable death.
For all of their self-created gods and values, human beings are merely the blind instruments of the Will’s blankly indifferent drive. The Will is an unfeeling, uncaring force at the core of human beings’ inner being, an inert weight of meaninglessness that spurs us on in a fruitless desiring. We could argue, in Aristotelian terms, that human self-realisation proceeds from the healthy potentials of our essential nature. Schopenhauer sees this nature in terms of suffering, lack, and deficiency.
“All willing springs from lack, from deficiency, and thus from suffering. Fulfillment brings this to an end; yet for one wish that is fulfilled there remain at least ten that are denied. Further, desiring lasts a long time, demands and requests go on to infinity, fulfillment is short and meted out sparingly. But even the final satisfaction itself is only apparent; the wish fulfilled at once makes way for a new one; the former is a known delusion, the latter not as yet known. No attained object of willing can give satisfaction that lasts and no longer declines…Therefore, so long as our consciousness is filled by our will, so long as we are given up to the throng of desires with its constant hopes and fears, so long as we are the subject of willing, we never obtain lasting happiness or peace…”
Desiring is eternal whilst fulfilment is scarce and sporadic. This eternal fruitless frustrating longing can be purged only by the selflessness that comes with aesthetic contemplation and Buddhist self-abnegation in face of reality as it is – for those few who have the talent for such things.
What makes Schopenhauer worthy of engaging is his willingness to face the possibility, born out by the facts of both history and nature, that human existence is pointless and that the human enterprise is farcical in its futilty. Who can deny it? And on what basis in reality? Human history is the tale of lengthy struggles yielding occasional victories in favour of freedom, civility and enlightenment against the backdrop of power, scarcity, violence and exploitation. The things we celebrate have been the rare exceptions to the rule of the things we decry. It is beholden upon those who assume the reality of freedom, fulfilment, and happiness in an objectively valuable, meaningful, and purposeful world to meet the challenge presented by Schopenhauer. Reality and the truth about it may well not be as benign as those affirming a natural reasonableness may think. Schopenhauer makes it clear that the false consciousness which rationalists seek to dispel as a condition of freedom and happiness may well be integral to our survival, a saving illusion that enables us to bear a reality that is more wretched than reasonable. Schopenhauer gives reasons why reality is such that it is better for human beings not to know the truth about it. Truth, here, will not help human beings to live well, the very opposite.
This is not, of course, a view that would be looked upon favourably by those who locate themselves in the Enlightenment or the Age of Reason before it, for whom error was to be dispelled by the commitment to truth. The point is that enlightenment rationalists need to recognise that reality and the truth about it is not necessarily favourable to the values of human freedom, health, and happiness and may well be inimical to them. There may well be nothing in physical nature to satisfy the cosmic human longing for meaning and belonging. Reality may well not be equipped to fill the God-shaped hole in the human heart. We may abandon this endless desiring as a futile effort based on an illusion, but if that leaves a passive resignation to a meaningless reality, then what quality of life remains? There’s nothing more to win and nothing left to lose.
The idea of a necessary illusion or saving fiction gains its appeal in face of the facts of an objectively valueless, meaningless, and purposeless universe. Human cannot live without a point and a purpose on a destinationless voyage, the effort of the struggle is simply too exhausting. Nietzsche was correct when he declared that 'he who has a “why” to live for can bear almost any “how.”’ Viktor Frankl’s experiences of the concentration camps bore out the truth of that view. That ‘why’ would appear to entail something much broader and richer than the bare facts of existence. There is good reason to believe that human beings would perish of the truth of the physical reality within which they seek to carve out meaningful lives.
Jonathan Sacks writes well on the connection between moral independence and hope:
Morality is the language of hope, for it presupposes that in a critical respect, man is not a part of nature. Because we are speakers of a language we are capable of imagination, of envisaging a reality other than that currently present to the senses. So, for us, there is a difference between 'is' and 'ought', between the world we observe and the world to which we aspire, and in aspiring begin to make. None of us can make that world alone, but we are not condemned to live alone.
Kinship and covenant link us to our fellow human beings so that they know they can rely on us and we know we can rely on them. The knowledge that we are strangers teaches us to reach beyond the boundary of 'us' and extend friendship and reciprocity to 'them'. The knowledge, too, that the earth is not ours, that we are temporary residents, heirs of those who came before us and guardians for those who will come after us in turn, steers us away from the destructive impulse - whether to war or excessive exploitation - which may sometimes come to those who have no stake in a future beyond their lifetime.
Sacks 2000 The Great Partnership ch 22 Reclaiming the Ground of Hope
Pushed beyond its limitations, reason undermines life at its source. Henri Bergson thought that religion is a self-preservative effort to keep human beings from suicide upon becoming conscious of the fact of death: ‘only the acceptance of a mystery beyond the compass of his reason keeps his life from becoming devaluated and his spirit from becoming discouraged over the reports of reason.’ (Mumford 1944: 24-25).
Reason often has told man he was defeated: why should the prisoner, the slave, the corrupted and the deformed and the ailing all go on with so few exceptions to their dismal end?
Mumford 1952: 30-31
Pushed too far, reason undermines life at its source. For Mumford, only the acceptance of a mystery beyond the compass of reason keeps human life from becoming devaluated and the spirit from becoming discouraged over the reports of reason. (Mumford 1944 ch 1).
In fine, the things which rationalists are inclined to dismiss as fictions, myths, and delusions should not be simply considered errors to be dispelled by the light of truth, but appraised as saving illusions which enable human beings to thrive in confrontation with a bleak, hostile reality. Human beings may be no more than a biological accident, clinging to a barren rock going nowhere in space. But, however random, a purposeless evolution has equipped us with a phenomenon which we know as the mind, which we use to shield ourselves from the unbearable knowledge of the sheer contingency of our existence. It seems that Nature has supplied us with a cure along with the disease, both of which falling under the rule of consciousness. We are encouraged to use that consciousness to create the ‘consolations’ of art, religion, and metaphysics, life-giving mythologies which are the conditions of a worthwhile existence in an inhospitable universe. Whilst these ‘mythologies’ may be false from a scientific standpoint, they do give us some significance when the brute facts declare our insignificance. Which is to make the point that an age of scientism has placed too much store in science, either extending science into areas where it doesn’t belong or merely dismissing questions of value, meaning, and significance as the realm of delusion. Against this we are right to hold that scientific knowledge is not the only form of knowledge, and that the nature and scope of truth depends upon its subject-matter. There is a truth that lies in the consequences that are produced rather than in the propositions that are put forward. Whilst such ‘mythologies’ may well not be true from a scientific standpoint, they may well express a truth about the human situation that transcends brute physical fact. Illusions may well be justified as necessary should they enable us to continue living with a sense of purpose and direction, making it seem that life is indeed worth living. Such ‘illusions’ as seem vitally necessary can hardly be considered illusions at all. The biggest illusions of all are entertained by those rationalists who think that the cosmic thirst for meaning can be quenched by disinfectant. A saving illusion which gives human beings access to the things they need for a meaningful existence is no illusion at all. The acceptance of bare physical truth seems destructive of human existence.
Those influenced by Nietzsche and Schopenhauer deny that our concepts, values, and ideals possess any substantive foundation in a world which is blankly indifferent to anything outside of its own physical imperatives. Nature is entirely unconcerned with human affairs. Those who seek to model human society upon this nature make a very grave error. However well founded it may be on science, science covers only a part of human existence, the part concerned with physical facts and processes, the easy part which pertains to the non-human world. For all of the scientific accuracy of the view that the world is objectively valueless, meaningless, and purposeless, there are sound moral, social, and political reasons for human beings to act as if the world is objectively valuable, meaningful, and purposeful. If we accept that all is contingent and that our most cherished values of freedom and happiness were no more firmly grounded than tyranny and misery, then there seems no way of avoiding an anarchy in which anything goes, so long as it serves as efficient means to the arbitrary ends of the various groups involved in a dogfight.
This is treacherous ground for a number of reason. The ‘as if’ argument seems to be no argument at all. This is the mode of reasoning adopted by an ‘ironic liberalism’ which seeks to defend itself against the threat posed by rising fundamentalisms. A liberalism which discarded its metaphysical assumptions and supports has effectively engaged in a moral and philosophical disarmament. It took the stable conditions in which its values operated as background assumptions for granted. All the time, however, unity and agreement unravelled in the clash of rival gods/goods. Liberalism now seeks its supports and foundations only to find that it has none. Hence the phrase ‘ironic liberalism,’ the ‘irony’ referring to the urge to act ‘as if’ liberalism’s most cherished values and ideals possess a substantive foundation, even though we know they do not. Whatever fundamentalisms are on the rise, they will surely run a coach-and-horses through such a flabby terrain. The age is dividing between extremes of strong and soggy. Soggy will not prevail.
Which isn’t to say that strong is the way to go, because it isn’t. An arid rationalism tends to generate its opposite of fideism, a mentality in which reason and reality come to be lost from view. The danger is that, in the absence of substantive grounds which relate our consciousness to reality, exercising our reason, the strength of our faith, commitment, and activism take the place of content. That’s the problem with identifying the meaning of life with the process of its search rather than with the quality of the end to be found. In this understanding, the precise identity of what we believe becomes of secondary significance to the fact that we do believe. Acting out of commitment becomes more important than specifying the substantive content of our commitments. We thus end up back where we began with the critique of a self-authorship in which particular individuals and groups take the true, the good, and the beautiful into their own hands and make of them what they will, as both clay and potter. People become committed to whatever version of their own identities they choose to fashion, the same with regard to the world around them, all of which may well be false when considered from an objective standpoint. As people fight it out, plunging the social world into the shadows and shallows, we may well prefer to take the disinfectant after all. The intensity with which the protagonists invest in the commitment they show, the tenacity with which they cleave to the altered realities and twisted images they have created of themselves and the world, as testament to the strength of their faith, leads them inexorably into the embrace of death-dealing delusion. To live with faith may be noble and necessary to infuse life with meaning and significance. But not any old faith. Commitment requires content, faith requires reason, sanity requires a reality-check.