The World Philosophy Made

by Scott Soames

  The challenge is not to replace religious faith with any other kind of faith, but to articulate a rational approach to life that helps individuals find what they need to face their own mortality, while continuing to contribute to the reason and evidence-based project of improving human societies. The danger to be avoided is expressed in a widely cited mid-twentieth-century remark of Malcolm Muggeridge (1903–1990):

  One of the peculiar sins of the twentieth century which we have developed to a very high level is the sin of credulity. It has been said that when human beings stop believing in God, they believe in nothing. The truth is much worse: they believe in anything.

  Essentially the same warning, expressed in a very different style, is put in the mouth a character extolling belief in the transcendent value of racial or ethnic identity in Tom Wolfe’s final novel, Back to Blood, in 2012.

  “Religion is dying … but everybody still has to believe in something. It would be intolerable—you couldn’t stand it—to finally have to say to yourself, ‘Why keep pretending? I’m nothing but a random atom inside a supercollider known as the universe.’ But believing in by definition means blindly, doesn’t it? So, my people, that leaves only our blood, the bloodlines that course through our very bodies, to unite us.… All people, everywhere, you have no choice but Back to blood.”1

  The worry expressed by Muggeridge and Wolfe is real. Yes, religion may, for large classes of people, be dying. Yes, we do need beliefs to endow our lives with meaning and purpose. But no, not just any passionate beliefs will do. We need rational, evidence-based beliefs capable of providing us knowledge of who we are, what we most value, what we are capable of, and what we cannot escape. Only then can we confidently articulate rational life-plans that, in bringing out the best in us, lead us to the meaning we need to deal with the challenges of life and the inevitability of death. The task can no longer be delegated to others. Philosophers, armed with all we have learned from what has gone before, may now be in a position to build on, and even exceed, the contributions of their ancient predecessors.

  In doing so, we must blend the old with the new. In chapter 13, I explained how prudential statements about what one ought to do may serve as a model for understanding the motivational force of statements about what one morally ought to do. Prudential guidance purports to identify actions that best advance one’s welfare. Since one may sometimes be in the dark about this, one may be motivated to accept guidance from a trusted family member, friend, or authority. Since one’s moral reasons for acting arise from one’s concern for the well-being of others and one’s reciprocal relationships with people of various sorts, moral reasons also have motivational force. The fact that our other-regarding interests arise from our social attachments, and so are central to our self-conceptions, magnifies that force.

  Human psychobiology and the facts of the human condition provide us with a motivational base in which our intertwined self- and other-regarding interests tie us to others. The new empirical challenge for philosophically minded social scientists is to verify and precisify this conception of human nature inherited from their philosophical predecessors. The new social and political challenge is to continue the process of developing social and economic institutions that blend self-interest with reciprocal respect for others in extensive systems of social cooperation, broadening our productive contact with them. The new philosophical challenge is to reconceptualize traditional understandings of virtue and happiness to accommodate our growing scientific knowledge of human nature, and to articulate compelling conceptions of the meaning of life in an era in which the consolations of religion are vanishing and the finality of one’s own death, and even the ultimate extinction of human life, appear, increasingly, to be incontrovertible.2

  For me, this reconceptualization begins with Aristotle’s belief that being human involves being naturally endowed with certain values, interests, and capacities. Taking the capacity for rational thought to be part of our essence, he rightly took the development and exercise of one’s rationality to be intrinsically fulfilling. Those who develop this capacity to the fullest value knowledge for its own sake, and so seek to discover fundamental truths about themselves, humanity, and the world. Being rational, human beings are also natural problem solvers, reasoning about how to best achieve their various ends. Although Aristotle took the disinterested discovery of theoretical truth to be the highest goal, he also rightly believed that a life spent pursuing ordinary human goals relating one to family, friends, colleagues, and community can lead to great happiness. Pursuing those goals wisely requires cultivating virtues, like self-control, generosity, ambition, and courage.

  Three lessons can be gleaned from this Aristotelian perspective. First, virtues—including both those that are naturally thought of as golden means between contrasting extremes and those (like honesty and kindness) that may not be—are character traits that require not only a good will and a kind heart, but also rational judgment and practice to fully develop. Second, the most basic goal of ethics is not to define which actions ought to be performed in any given set of circumstances, which may prove impossible, but to specify the kind of character one should strive for. Third, the virtuous person is one whose dispositions to act reflect a judicious mix of self-regarding and other-regarding values.

  In speaking of the connection between self and others, Aristotle emphasizes the importance of companions, whom he likens to second selves—those close enough to provide one with insight about oneself, in part because one wishes to share oneself with them for the mere joy of doing so. Wisdom, as he understood it, improves the recognition of what advances one’s long-term welfare and the identification of actions most likely to advance it. Thus, the path to wisdom is our best route to personal fulfillment. But wisdom is not a solitary achievement. The theoretical knowledge we need typically rests on the efforts of countless others over long periods. Even our intimate knowledge of ourselves is often heavily dependent on others.

  We construct our lives by choices we make among alternatives open to us. Our lives are something like books we are writing, without ready-made endings, and sometimes without even a good plan of what should come next. To continue our books, we need coauthors who may know certain things about us better than we do. To secure their help, we must open ourselves to them and value them for who they are, trusting that they will return the favor. First and foremost, coauthors include our closest companions, but they also may include, to a lesser degree, neighbors and colleagues, indeed anyone we count on in the activities that matter most to us. Everyone knows that others can often judge how we look, and what our manner conveys, better than we can. The same is true of aspects of our character.

  Our interconnectedness with others relates wisdom to virtue and happiness. Virtuous character traits are widely admired because they are important in ensuring the benefits of social cooperation. Because they are admired, being judged virtuous is very much to one’s advantage. Because virtues are sometimes hard to fake, particularly in the long run, and the efforts to uncover fakery are unceasing, being virtuous is often the best strategy for being so judged. In addition, we naturally love, like, respect, admire, appreciate, emulate, and feel protective of selected others. These are people we genuinely care about, and who we hope feel similarly about us. Because of their relationship to us, the sacrifices we make of our own narrowly self-interested goals on their behalf are compensated by the high other-regarding value we place on their welfare. Since reciprocity is a given within this select sphere, we also know that either we, or those near and dear to us, may benefit from the other-regarding actions of those in our moral circle. As social institutions become more complex and encompassing, this circle arising from our natural sociability is extended, generating concern for, and graded reciprocal obligations to, others without well-defined limits. In this way, virtue and happiness often end up being complementary rather than competing pursuits.

  It’s not that virtue guarantees happiness; the vicissitudes of fortune
can bring down the best among us. Nor does happiness always depend on virtue; it is possible for great good fortune to be lavished on the undeserving. Nevertheless, both virtue and happiness depend on satisfying one’s most fundamental self- and other-regarding ends, which are normally mutually supporting. Thus, cultivating virtue is usually a good strategy for achieving happiness. Although there are cases in which sacrificing one’s happiness is the price of virtue, determining the extent to which happiness is lost in those cases, and evaluating the importance of that loss, depends on understanding what happiness is.

  Aristotle claimed that happiness is our ultimate goal, thereby seeming to indicate that it is the end to which all other ends are subservient. That was unfortunate, because it suggests that happiness is both the thing we most desire and that for which we desire anything else. It isn’t either. He was on firmer ground in denying that happiness is a feeling of elation, a collection of intense pleasurable sensations, or, indeed, any kind or collection of feelings or sensations at all. According to Aristotle, species of animals and human beings have natural functions. Human happiness, as he conceived it, consists in performing our natural function well, which he took to involve rational and virtuous living. Although we wouldn’t put it exactly as he did, we can formulate a similar idea in more modern terms.

  Suppose we take happiness to be a high level of welfare, the constituents of which (as I indicated in the previous chapter) involve the satisfaction of our most basic physical, mental, and social needs, the development of our most distinctive human capacities, and the satisfaction of our most important, biologically based desires. Such a state is clearly both desirable and widely desired. Since it encompasses the satisfaction of our social needs, which includes our commitment to valued others, it also encompasses some elements of virtuous living. It is important to note that being in this state involves the existence of events and states of affairs about which it is possible to be ignorant—e.g., whether one is really both safe and healthy, whether one has, in fact, both achieved what one has aimed at and successfully developed one’s most important capacities, and whether those one cares most about are truly thriving, in part due to one’s efforts. Hence, knowing that one is happy, in this Aristotelian sense, requires far more than knowledge of one’s feelings.

  To falsely believe that one is happy in this special sense is not to be happy. For example, one might know what the central constituents of one’s welfare are, while wrongly thinking that each contingency on which it depends has been met. You might feel happy because you believe that, with your help, the love of your life is thriving, thereby cementing your life together—when in fact you have merely been used all along. Since you don’t know this, you might feel great. But the feeling would be false, and of diminished value.

  What would you say, if, after discovering the truth, you were asked whether you had been happy? If your conception of happiness is simply a matter of feelings, you might say, “Yes, I was happy, but my happiness was based on a lie.” Many people today do seem to think of happiness in that way. But if you are one of them, you should realize that happiness, as you conceive it, is inherently transitory, often being in flux from day to day or hour to hour. On the other hand, if you identify happiness with Aristotelian well-being, you will say, in answer to the question, “I wrongly thought I was happy, but in fact I wasn’t; I had merely been deceived and humiliated.”

  For our purposes, it doesn’t matter which conception is the most prevalent; both are coherent. What is important is to recognize that, in order for what we call “happiness” to be the philosophically important and highly desirable state we often take it to be, being in that state must require one’s stable state of contentment to be well founded. Understanding happiness in this way, what we most hope for ourselves is not simply to be in a stable state of contented good feeling about our lives, our relationships, and what we imagine ourselves to have achieved. We want to know that these feelings are well founded.

  Most of us do desire a combination of the subjective good feeling with knowledge. We do, of course, desire some things, like a delicious dessert or a warm shower, merely for the feelings we have when we get them. In these cases we might—like a dieter longing for an ice cream sundae—gladly sacrifice the object of our original desire (the sundae) for artificially generated (sundae-eating) subjective sensations. But this is the exception rather than the rule. As Robert Nozick emphasizes, given the offer of entering an “experience machine” in which you would spend the rest of your life enjoying fully realistic simulations of the satisfaction of your desires, while wrongly believing the events you took to be occurring to be real, most of us would decline the offer, preferring instead to remain in touch with reality.3 We would do this despite realizing that we will probably not fulfill many of our fondest wishes, and will fail to achieve some of our most compelling goals.

  What’s more, our choice would be correct. The feeling of happiness that the experience machine provides is not what we most wish for. What we desire for ourselves, far more than the quality of any particular experiences, is to have a positive relation with reality—to know it, to shape it, to improve it, and to share our lives with similarly engaged others. What I most desire for others, and what I most want to contribute, are: the happiness and fulfillment of my wife, the flourishing of my sons, the return to health of a dear friend, the well-being of my friends and colleagues, the education of my students, the advancement of the School of Philosophy at my university, the progress of philosophy (and all areas it touches), the spread of free institutions, the vitality of my country, and the revival of the strength and vigor of the best traditions of western civilization. In addition, I wish for continued advances in medicine, technology, and economic well-being throughout the world plus the gradual expansion of the reach of humane, universalistic, and mutually shared moral concerns. For myself, I most desire continued health, productivity, and longevity, plus the opportunity to do my part (sometimes large, sometimes small) to advance my other goals. It is a full plate, the pursuit of which has little to do with subjective experiences of the sort generated by Nozick’s imagined experience machine. In this, I am not unusual.

  This nonsubjective conception of happiness brings us to compelling questions about the meaning of life and the finality of death. For one who, like me, places no credence in a personal afterlife, the prospect of death is frighteningly simple—namely, nonexistence. Why, one may ask, is it frightening? Since the nonexistent experience nothing, none of us will experience anything bad, unpleasant, or even boring, after we die—just as we had no such experiences before we were conceived. It is, of course, disappointing that we won’t learn about many things we wish for. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to observe, and even assist in, the triumphs of wives, husbands, children, friends, colleagues, and cherished institutions after we are gone? Wouldn’t it be even better to protect them from danger and strengthen them in hard times? Yes, it would, but that isn’t in the cards. Although we may regret missing out, the realization that we will isn’t why we fear death. We fear death because we find the prospect of nonexistence dizzyingly unfathomable and terrifying. There is no getting over it; we are simply built that way.

  That being so, we must cope as best we can. It may help to achieve clarity about what awaits, while developing the courage to face what can’t be avoided in a way that preserves our dignity and sets a good example for others. These are no small things, nor are they beyond our power. Strength of mind and firmness of character can be developed and made habitual, providing one with the resources to confront what comes. But these virtues aren’t the whole story to our response to death. As one gets older, and death slowly approaches, one’s personal future shrinks, bringing the shape of one’s life as a whole into clearer focus. This raises the question of what, in the end, one’s life will amount to.

  In addition to foreshortening the personal future into which we can project, advancing years often diminish our ability to participate in some activities we
once enjoyed. But this can be counterbalanced, not only by increased wisdom and decreased pressure to advance our careers, but also by sharpening our focus on the people, projects, and institutions we most value, including those we confidently expect to outlive us. Often this is natural enough, as parents focus on their adult children and young grandchildren, entrepreneurs pass on family businesses, scholars strike out in new directions or undertake long-delayed projects, and practitioners of all kinds enjoy training and sharing their experience with the rising generation.

  The details vary for each person, but the prescription is general. Broaden and deepen your commitment to people and things you most value, and—in the best cases—to whom, or to which, you have the most to offer. Your purpose can then be found in the contribution you make to ends transcending yourself. Acting in this way ties you to the continuing stream of human life that long preceded and will, you have reason to believe, long outlast you.4 If peace can be found in approaching death, the way to find it is through ever closer and more active involvement with highly valued aspects of the human project.

  This, admittedly, is easier said than done. Just as you can’t find happiness without already valuing others and pursuing goals independent of your own happiness, so you can’t find meaning simply because you need to fill your own emptiness. You can’t find meaning unless you are not, in fact, empty, because you already care about people, projects, and institutions beyond yourself. And if you do care, you will act in ways calculated to actually help, rather than merely to advance your reputation for trying. There is no peace in confronting your coming annihilation, if you don’t genuinely care about the future you won’t see. If you do care, the value you place on your reputation will be dwarfed by the good you do for others.