Raimund Gaita is, by his own account, an absolutist. “Good” is to show any human being, with no nonsense about worthiness or any other measure, a basic level of care, consideration, and respect. Love is the best term for encapsulating the ways of goodness. Those ways are multiple; there is no formula for goodness; what goodness calls us to do in any particular circumstances cannot be predicted ahead of time, or prescribed by some sort of rational decision procedure that relies on principles.
Evil is to disregard the reality of the other, our obligation to her as a human being.
But what does it mean to be a human being? Turns out that Gaita is an absolutist when it comes to that question as well. The line between humans and other sentient creatures is bright and uncrossable. In fact, what he writes strongly implies that some human creatures don’t measure up to “full” humanhood. Basically, Gaita is a hard-ass when it comes to describing a worthy human life. Yes, even the most unworthy human deserves good treatment at the hands of other humans. But (and here is one place his favorite word “serious” comes into play) living an admirable human life is a task it would seem not many are up to.
The leap from considering good and evil as exhibited by human actions to a discussion of how to live a worthy and admirable life is not obvious—but it basically occurs in two steps. First, as we have seen, “moral understanding” is the focus of much of Gaita’s book. That means he is not very interested in good and evil actions per se. Instead, he is interested in how a person acquires the “lucidity” (another favorite term) to understand what is good and what is evil. (The previous posts considered the means toward reaching such an understanding.) So it is the moral status of the agent that occupies much of his attention. The second step follows: what kind of person, what type of character, is developed (produced?) when someone incorporates a lucid (enlightened?) moral understanding as a fundamental commitment of her self?
“[T]he ethical is constitutive of what it is to be a human being and what it means to live a human life. . . . It also gives sense to the concept of destiny, that is, to the idea that we must discover what, in our circumstances, must be our way of being true to the task of living a properly human life” (135; my italics). “A morality must claim (though we may judge that it fails) to deepen rather than cheapen our understanding of what we care for. That fact argues for a deeper integration of morality into a concern for the meaning of our lives than is usually acknowledged by philosophy” (38).
This is where Gaita goes full-scale Socratic. Basically, he insists that the “unexamined life” is less than fully human. For that reason, he does not think a capacity to suffer marks a life as worth respecting (and treating well) as a human life. Beyond the animal’s capacity to feel pain, human life also evidences a capacity to shape itself deliberately according to a vision of what it would take to live a meaningful life. To be blunt about it: humans are concerned with meaning and can try to live a live answerable to meaning’s demands. Animals have no such similar concern.
“Much (perhaps most) of our reflections on life and morality occurs in a conceptual space of the kind I have been trying to delineate as . . . ‘the realm of meaning’”(338-9; Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception; 2nd. Edition, 2004).
“The lives of animals have no meaning, or they have meaning only in an attenuated sense. I mean that as a grammatical remark [in the Wittgensteinian sense of “grammar”]—partly on the idea of an animal (as when we speak of human beings and animals) and partly on the idea of meaning. It is what lies behind the contrast between animals and human beings . . . . The sense of ‘meaning’ to which I am appealing is sometimes expressed in the contrast between a concern for the meaning of our lives as opposed to a pursuit of happiness” (116).
“A biography is a story of a life that tries to reveal its meaning, and that is connected to the way it reveals the individuality of its subject. It would be absurd to write the biography of an animal, except anthropomorphically as is done in children’s stories. . . . An animal’s life does not have meaning because an animal cannot live its life deeply or shallowly, lucidly of opaquely, honestly or dishonestly, worthily or unworthily” (118).
OK. So what does one need to do, what kind of way of being-in-the-world counts as living a worthy life?
It is not all that easy to pull out the answer from Gaita’s book. But certain things come clear. First, one must be concerned with the meaning of one’s life, with the “significance” of one’s actions. (See pg. 44). Their significance is not exactly tied to consequences—either for ourselves or upon others (although I think Gaita is squishy on this point). He definitely wants to avoid being a consequentialist, but he does think—along with Aristotle—that our actions not only reveal character (i.e. show what we care most deeply about), but also develop character. The key thing for Gaita is awareness (lucidity). That is, we should always attend to what it is we care about, what we think is significant, and consider how our actions promote or betray those deep commitments. “The idea that a requirement to lucidity is internal to a certain understanding of life and its meaning is at least as old as Socrates” (211). A certain kind of attentiveness to the circumstances, to others, and to oneself is a sine non qua of a worthy life.
The second requirement for a meaningful life is more obscure. Gaita struggles to describe it; he keeps telling us what it isn’t. Here’s my attempt at reconstructing his view. With a certain kind of serpent eating its own tale feel, the key seems to be making the quest to lead a meaningful life central to oneself. In other words, if we take living a meaningful life as our primary task, then we will orient ourselves in the world and toward others in a distinctive way. The hallmarks of that way are (it would seem) an ongoing and overarching concern with the “significance” of our actions and dispositions, where “significance” (unfortunately) remains rather vague, but seems to be tied to our enacting our love of the things we care most deeply about. And with a kind of circularity (that, perhaps, Gaita might say is unavoidable) the reason for caring deeply about something is either its meaningfulness (because the goal is to live a meaningful life) or its “preciousness” (as in the ungrounded assertion that every single human life is precious).
More concretely, the focus on living a meaningful life entails a certain kind of integrity, even of unity. The hedonist (Gaita tells us) can have the unity of single-minded purpose: the pursuit of pleasure. But the hedonist cannot have the unity of aligning his past actions with his present or future ones. He is opportunistic, and will do today what promises pleasure, irrespective of its connection to and implications for past commitments. With Socrates as his example, Gaita describes how “we may betray our past or make a mockery of it. One of the reasons Socrates gave for not fleeing from prison was that to do so would betray his past. Judgments like that reveal a concern for the past which is not merely prudential, which is not only a concern to learn from it for the sake of the future. Someone who takes such judgments seriously sees her life as having a distinctive kind of unity, or as aspiring to such unity” (128).
Gaita moves on to speculate that we might best understand Aristotle’s notion of eudaimonia in terms of such “unity” (rejecting common translations of the Aristotelean term as “happiness” or “flourishing” on the way to his own proposed understanding). “Human beings are distinguished from animals by the fact that their life has meaning. That distinguishes them more radically from animals than reference to their capacities and properties does. Our ergon (taken now as our task, our work, or as McDowell suggests, ‘what it is the business of man to do’) is to be understood according to the claims that meaning makes upon us. Responsiveness to those claims is the responsive recognition of our ergon. Eudaimonia is predicated of a complete life (a unity conditioned by meaning) which has been faithful (true) to the distinctive character of our ergon. If it is distinctive of human beings to lead a life which has meaning that bestows on that life a distinctive unity, then it is perfectly intelligible that the recognition of that should claim us in fidelity to it” (131).
Of course, Gaita acknowledges that many do not live their lives as if the fact of meaningfulness laid a claim (maybe the most important claim) upon them. If you do not live a life oriented toward meaning, or one that aims to achieve some kind of unity that reflects ongoing commitments, does that mean your life is less than human? Gaita doesn’t go there. He is more interested in what morality calls us to be than in chastising those who do not hear or do not heed its call. But this is where “serious” comes in (as I will discuss in my next post). Some people are just not serious. It remains unclear what response Gaita thinks appropriate when encountering such people. Chiding them for being unserious? Consoling oneself, Pharisee-like, that such people lead “shallow” lives and thus miss out on what a life can be? Or more direct forms of punishment?
There is one further point to be made about what characterizes a “meaningful life.” This point must be drawn out from Gaita because it comes up in the context of his considering why the slave owner cannot recognize the humanity of the slave. Basically, Gaita seems to be saying (in a tortuous six pages—158-163–that don’t yield any clear passages to quote) that we see someone as fully human when we can ascribe to them the intention and the ability to lead a meaningful life. That capacity is evidenced by the individual’s making plans (i.e. making choices and then carrying them out; the individual is an initiator of actions), but (even more crucially) evidencing a commitment to an identity. Individuals want to insert themselves into the world as presences that matter and tie that presence to a certain coherent sense of who they are. The investment in identity (another way of talking about a commitment to integrity) shows that the individual cares about the meaning of her life. Again, it is not as if Gaita naively believes that everyone has such a commitment. Only the “serious” do. But he thinks we must posit the universal capacity for such a serious investment if we are to accept and act upon the infinite preciousness of every single human life.
It is typical of Gaita that these pages are more focused on the slave owner and what it would take for him to recognize the slave’s humanity than on what constitutes the slave’s human-ness. But I think we can infer that a meaningful human life for Gaita reveals itself in an orientation that is not directed to happiness, pleasure, or acquiring prestige, power, or material wealth. Rather, the meaningful life is directed toward the creation of a self (the subject of biography) who deems certain persons and things worth caring for—and finds her meaning in doing that work of care, thus giving her a life she can affirm as well worth living.
McGowanBlog 