Category: Meaning and Life and the Humanities

Honor

Arendt never appeals to honor—and, no doubt, she would find the concept antique. But both her celebration of “public happiness” and her comments on the desire to excel in public, to live a life worthy of becoming the stuff of stories, point to her desire to find some account of motives that transcend the desire to satisfy material, bodily needs. On the one hand, denigration of the body has a long history in Western thought, with both Greek and Christian variants. On the other hand, that suspicion of the “material” gains a new impetus in the 1950s from the twin perspective of Arendt’s anti-Marxist repudiation of materialist philosophy and her equally ant-consumerist suspicions of “materialist” consumer culture.

Love of the world, then, is meant to describe a commitment that extends beyond the selfish desire to accumulate material goods, just as her resolutely non-material “action” and its production of an ephemeral “space of appearances” introduces something utterly distinct from the necessities connected to “life.”

What I am pursuing here is her account of what motivates “action” (understood in her strict sense of the term). The good action directly strives for is called, at various times in her work, “freedom,” or “renown.” Actors want to win the admiration of others even as they also (in Nietzschean fashion) simply enjoy the expenditure of energy that is action.

I see a double problem here, a Scylla and Charybdis, if you will. Scylla is the contempt for the body, for mere life. We have already seen this with Ruskin declaring “life is the only wealth” and then going on to tell us the terms upon which different living creatures should accept death. Arendt’s version of this line of thinking comes in her meditations on Socrates in her late work. Living out of harmony with oneself, sacrificing one’s integrity and moral ideals simply in order to survive in a despicable regime like Hitler’s, is to win life on terms where it is not worth having. So we get two things here: a standard by which some lives are ruled deficient, and a denigration of the bodily as (at best) an insufficient basis of value judgments or (at worst) a positive detriment to making value judgments. In the second case, whatever pertains to the body and its needs should be ruled out of court when considering the worth of a human life. Pushed even further, to the Hegel master/slave phenomenon, the person who would prioritize “life” over other (more worthy) standards ends up a slave—and (perhaps) rightfully so. This final bit is not Hegel because he has his dialectical reversal coming, but it is not clear that Arendt offers any such escape. She seems simply contemptuous of the modern consumer who has no sense of or taste for the joys of public life. Such people are living swinish (Mill), unfree (Arendt) lives.

The Charybdis here is trying to identify a non-pernicious standard of value that doesn’t simply reduce to supplying material needs. We certainly seem to need a non-utilitarian, non-economic, set of motives—and those motives should, in some form or another, include moral considerations addressing our desired relations to others and to the planet. Reductionism (Kenneth Burke’s “debunking”) can only lead to cynicism. If everyone is always out for the main chance; if it’s the struggle for life that overwhelms all else, then we get the macho “eat or be eaten” with its concomitant scorn for all the sentimental claptrap about decency, rights, love, altruism etc. Yesterday’s New York Review of Books offers a poignant example. James Shapiro reviews a new interpretation of Hamlet that basically argues that the play shows Shakespeare revealing humanist claptrap to be the hot air that it really is. Hamlet delays because he can’t face up to the realpolitik of courtly life, while spouting half-baked humanist truisms that he has neither mastered nor believed. Hamlet is a fatuous young fop—and the play reveals his fatuousness. And Shakespeare is a complete nihilist. A perfect reading for our current political moment. There are no barriers of any sort (religious, moral, humanist) against sheer brute power.

When Arendt comes to this point, in her meditations on morality under the supreme conditions of Nazi rule, she can only conclude that the kind of integrity, the felt need to live a life in accord with the moral principles one had understood as one’s own, is rare, but not impossible or utterly unknown. She famously says that the Nazis showed that most people will change their moral code as easily as they will change their table manners. (She probably should have said as easily as they will change the kinds of clothes they wear in response to changes in fashion. We also have Shakespeare’s marvelously cynical statement in The Tempest –spoken by the villain Antonio—that “For all the rest,/They’ll take suggestion as a cat laps milk;/They’ll tell the clock to any business that/We say befits the hour” (Act 2, sc 1, 289-92). Most people will say what the powerful tell them to say.) In short, Arendt has only a very thin reed to offer us; there will be some who will die rather than live the life totalitarianism puts on offer, but only “some” and they will not be effective in face of the ruthless totalitarians. A very short step from cynicism—or maybe the better term in despair.

Despair is certainly one quite understandable response to our dark times. And maybe the long bloody track of human history makes a sensible response altogether to “the human condition.” For we can consider one last twist of the knife: honor (or morality) might seem, if it exists, a bulwark against sheer power. But then honor and morality themselves are so often used to justify violence. Honor killings, as well as the fact that “honor” is so central to warrior cultures, reminds us that the “doux commerce” of the bourgeoisie was supposed to usher in a kinder and gentler era. The bourgeois critique of honor is hardly entirely off-base; the same can be said of the atheists’ critique of sectarian violence. The Nietzschean conclusion that humans can turn anything into the occasion for oppression and violence appears to hold. Despair and misanthropy seem to follow in course, accompanied by a fierce sarcasm about all the high-falutin’ words with which humans dress up their shitty behavior to one another—and to non-humans.

I want a standard of decency that will hold, some kind of barrier against the flood of exploitation. I don’t see one on the horizon at the moment.

Arendt on Life (Continued)

At times Arendt appears to believe (desire?) that action be “pure” in the same exact way that Kant tries to disengage (in Critique of Judgment) the aesthetic from any “interest.” Action would be unmotivated, a pursuit purely for its own sake, unproductive. That stance can seem a form of vitalism (ironically returning us to the “life” that Arendt is trying to spurn.) Action for its own sake, in an almost Nietzschean way, is the outflow of the energy of the living being. Taken a bit less mechanically, a bit more Romantically, this outflow can be considered “expressive.” It manifests (in the space of appearances) the being form which it emanates. There is more than a little expressionism in Arendt on action. After all, she tells us action is identity disclosing; even more, she suggests that action is identity creating. Like a speaker who doesn’t know what she thinks or believes before the words are spoken, the agent in Arendt discovers who she is in the act of acting. The “natality” that Arendt ties to the “miracle” of acting is, first and foremost, the appearance of a unique being in the world. “Plurality” is Arendt’s name for this singularity, for the fact that every living human (perhaps every living being, although Arendt probably believes only humans are capable of action) is distinctive. The “world” in Arendt is diminished, its plurality compromised, if any single human is denied the “freedom” that enables “action.” That is the over-riding sin of totalitarianism, its hostility to plurality, its attempt to reduce all human singularity to “the same.”

Pursuing this logic, “meaning” is the product of “action” being taken up by the community, which tells “stories” about the actions of its members. We can’t know the meaning of our actions in advance (just as the consequences of action are also unpredictable). Meaning is a communal product, dependent on what J. L. Austin calls “uptake.” A good example is saying something unintentionally funny. The fact that I didn’t mean it to be funny is under-determinative of the meaning that my statement acquires. No one owns or can control the meaning of an action or a statement. Rather, meaning unfolds in the intersubjective exchanges between people located in the world, in the space of appearances. Thus, action both constitutes that space of appearances (as described in the last post) and initiates the interchanges that create meaning. Here again Arendt seems Hegelian; although she doesn’t use the language of “recognition,” she does seem to believe that action and identity only acquire substance—a meaning, even a reality—when witnessed by others and taken up by them through some kind of response (debate, agreement, and story are all modes of response that her work considers). Love of the world, then, is partly love for (and care of) the enabling conditions of selfhood. If each being strives to persist in being (Spinoza’s conatus), then the world is required for that persistence to register (as it were), for it to be perceived, experienced. Self-consciousness—the ability to understand that one is enjoying “freedom”—depends on the existence of the self in communication with others, an interaction that creates, even as it requires, “the world,” the polis.

The paradox, then, is that life (“bare life”) does not require the polis—which is the source of Arendt’s worry that life-obsessed humans will not love the world, will pursue the swinish pleasures of satisfying the necessities of bodily persistence, and neglect striving for meaning, freedom, and identity. This is the element of aristocratic hauteur in her thought—not to mention an implied boundary between humans (capable of freedom and the self-conscious attachment to the worldly, political conditions of its achievement) and non-humans (governed by the relentless, unthinking pursuit of life’s necessities). The non-humans labor, humans act. Which has the disturbing Aristotelean corollary that humans who only labor are best understood as sub-human.

Action, then, is the guarantee of humanness, so it does have a product: the very distinction between a free life and a life tied to necessities. Judith Butler, rightly in my view, objects at precisely this point that Arendt “naturalizes” a distinction that should, rather, be understood as produced by power. (A basic application of the Foucualdian notion of “productive power.”) It is human social arrangements, established and maintained by coercive and discursive power, that relegates some to a life of labor and others to the enjoyment of freedom. Furthermore, the very distinction between labor and action is produced discursively to denigrate one form of human behavior over the other. Cooking food is not inherently (“naturally”) and for all time ‘meaningless.” The foodie revolution of the past thirty years attests to the ways that the meaning of activities shifts radically over time and in different social contexts. There is plenty to say about how the emergence of celebrity chefs introduces new insidious distinctions into a practice (cooking and eating) common to all humans, but there can be no denying that the meaning of those practices has been considerably altered. The status of Arendtian labor is hardly fixed in the ways she seems to think it is. Meanings are much more fluid that her triad of “labor, work, and action” indicates. (Several Arendt scholars have called that triad “ontological,” and see it as establishing the fundamental grounding of her argument in The Human Condition). Her mistake was taking the ground as fixed, as non-mutable.

Life in Arendt, then, can be seen as having two different drives: the first one is to sustain itself by securing the necessities (food, shelter) required to survive, the second if to secure meaning and freedom. She is afraid pursuit of the first will overwhelm a desire to satisfy the second. But she rather muddies the water by trying to describe the action that would secure meaning and freedom as unmotivated, taking freedom to mean something we are not compelled to do, but only do for its own sake. Thus, she is 1) not clear about the motives that underlie “free action,” and 2) afraid that under- or un-motivated “action” will not be attractive enough, not be compelling enough, to insure that humans actually undertake it.

Finally, Arendt introduces yet another motive for love of the world. The polis is not only a space of appearances that allows us to acquire a meaningful identity through the interaction with others, but also a form of “organized remembrance.” It turns out that she believes we have a deep desire to leave a trace of our existence, that our response to a self-consciousness about death (suggesting, again, that knowing we will die distinguished humans from other living creatures) is to create a social structure that allows for (hardly guarantees) we will be remembered. That drive for remembrance underwrites actions that aim to be memorable; in short, we crave fame. We want to be the stuff of stories, to exist in the mouths of others. We should love the world because only something that persists after our own lives are over can provide a means toward our being remembered after our deaths. Machiavellian virtú, which Arendt associates with virtuosity, is the agonistic striving to be memorable, to be extraordinary, which is inevitably competitive and comparative. Arendt appears to endorse the fierce competitiveness of the Greek heroes of The Iliad, even though it seems plausible to me to see their boasts and insults as hyper-masculine and sadly adolescent posturings that justify an aggression that is hardly appealing. Not every one gets to be remembered; only the great.

Two final comments: life, Arendt seems to be saying, is only fully satisfying if we can claim a victory over death insofar as we will be remembered after our life is done. Thus, even as she denigrates “life” as the supreme motive, she ends up wanting a victory of life over death—and uses “action” as a means to garner that victory. It is, it seems, not so easy to banish “life” as the supreme motive. Instead, what really seems to be the crux is not “life” versus “non-life,” but (instead) bodily life versus some notion of a “higher” (more meaningful, more self-conscious) life. We are invested in “life”—and, even more, in our own individual life and its persistence. In the “higher” form, that investment entails a stake in achieving an identity through action in the space of appearances, and in having that unique identity, recognized (minimally) and admired (maximally) during our lifetimes and remembered after our deaths.

Still, even if we conclude that Arendt cannot banish life as fully from our imagination of the polis as she wants to do, we can accept the performative paradox that troubles her as worthy of some worry, even though I take her anxieties on this score overblown. We ensure the survival of a language every time we use it to communicate. A language exists and persists by virtue of its being used; nothing else secures that existence. Yet speakers of the language only contribute to its survival inadvertently. In talking with others, I am not aiming to keep my language alive. Of course, in some circumstances, a language can be seen as endangered and various linguistic activities can be undertaken with the explicit aim of preserving the language. But in a thriving speech community, with a large number of members, no one is speaking with the purpose of preserving the language. (In this vein, I would argue that grammarians, those who teach language in schools, are, in fact, futilely trying to hold back the changes internal—and inevitable—to any language in use. But that’s another story).

Arendt’s worry seems to be that, in pursuing life, the persistence of the space of appearances, the public square that is the polis, will not be insured. Unlike a language that survives precisely because it is being used, the space of appearances might disappear because people lose their taste for “public happiness.” The split she introduces between labor and action, a split between pursuing necessities and acting freely, means that “bare life” could proceed (maybe even flourish) in the absence of action, the loss of “the world.” Maybe we will (as a species) lose our longing for fame, our desire to be remembered after our deaths. Again, the hint of an aristocratic melancholy at the disappearance of “honor” as a motivating factor for the bourgeoisie lingers in Arendt’s work. If “getting and spending” comes to be the all in all, “the world” will be lost—and with it any hope to be remembered.

Enough for now. I will try to think about “honor” in subsequent posts.

Arendt On Life and Love of the World

Arendt is famously adamant that politics cannot and should not devote itself to issues focused on the maintenance of life. Attending to such issues can only lead to disaster, as exemplified by the French Revolution being hijacked by the enrages. Lurking underneath her analysis of the French Revolution, one suspects, is a fierce anti-communism. The problem with Marxism (she implies without ever fully stating) is that it turns politics over to “questions of life,” to precisely “economic” issues, and thus a) loses what is distinctive and valuable about the political and b) leads to the massive infliction of death, a terror that makes the sins of Robespierre pale in comparison.

Why doesn’t Arendt condemn Marxism forthrightly? Because she is appalled by the know-nothing anti-communism of McCarthy and his ilk in the 1950s America and does not want to be welcomed into their camp as a fellow traveler. But, as starkly as Hayek, Arendt insists that the economy is private and must remain private. The dire consequences of mixing economic and politics are actually not that far different in Arendt’s analysis as in Hayek’s. He predicts “serfdom,” she sees an inability to access the “freedom” that action enables (where action—as distinct from labor and work– is only possible in the political realm.) Only action, in Arendt’s theory, is free. Labor and work unfold under the sign of “necessity.” And it is fair to say that in both Hayek and Arendt, “justice” (or, at least, “social justice” which concerns itself with a fair distribution of material goods along with equal protection under the law and equal access to political participation) gets short shrift. Very explicitly in Hayek, who fulminates against the “mirage” of social justice and sees “envy” as the only motivation driving any effort to achieve social justice. But almost as explicitly in Arendt, who seems to think the attempt to achieve such justice by the French revolutionaries as a destructive quest to the impossible. To attach politics to the promise of ending poverty is to raise hopes for a goal that cannot be reached—and the resultant disappointment generates a fury that tears society apart. In On Revolution, Arendt appears as fatalistic as Hayek about the possibility of achieving anything remotely like economic equality. Rather, political equality can be achieved, but only by building an impenetrable border between inevitable economic inequality and the equality that is to reign in the “space of appearances.” One type of status (economic status) is to have no impact, no bearing on a different kind of status, the political status enjoyed by the citizen.

The problem in the real world, of course, is that status and power don’t work that way. Power clings to status, but is mobile (extremely so) from one form of status to another. You can’t build a wall to keep economic power from generating political power. Rousseau was right to say that economic inequality was fatal to democracy. Plutocracy is the almost inevitable result of tolerating large economic inequalities.

Arendt does have an escape clause in her reflections on these issues—one that she, oddly enough, borrows from Marx. Oddly because she is generally anti-Marxist (because he substitutes economics for politics) and because the notion she does adopt is one of the most implausible Marxist tenets. Economic matters, Arendt claims in several places, are merely matters of “administration,” not of politics. Marx, of course, argued that the state would wither away in a classless society, leaving only the question of the “administration of things” (a wonderfully vague phrase). The idea seems to be that such administrative matters are conflict-free, simple questions of means. Politics is the realm of conflict, of argument, of disagreement—which Marx abhors and wants to abolish and which Arendt celebrates and wants to enhance. But such Arendtian conflict is never to be over material things—or, at least, over the distribution of material things. Or something like that. I am not the first to complain that it is not clear what Arendtian politics is “about.” She wants a free space of appearances where opinions are enunciated—and sees that speaking in public in agonistic deliberation with one’s equals as uniquely identity forming. But she rarely, if ever, considers the end point of those deliberations. In fact, she insists that the “action” which is epitomized by that public speaking is “unproductive.”

Now, in one sense, I think it fair to say that Arendt’s idea is something like this. We can all have an “opinion” about whether or not a bridge should be built over the river. We can offer reasons in a public debate about this decision, but there is no “truth” of the matter. Politics, then, would encompass the deliberation. But once the decision to build the bridge is made, its actual construction is a matter of “administration.” You call in the engineers and they get it done. It is not a matter of opinion, something we can argue about, to construct a bridge that can actually carry traffic without collapsing. “Truth,” which she calls “pre-political” (or maybe should be considered “apolitical”) takes over when it comes to the engineering decisions.

An obvious problem, of course, is that many “administrative” matters are much less cut and dried than building a bridge. (And even with the bridge, there will be disagreements about its look, and constraints connected to budget, amounts of traffic, availability of materials etc., some of which will entail debate beyond the expertise of the engineers.) Thus, for example, we can agree, after deliberation, that we want to decrease infant mortality rates. But there are no cut and dried methods that advance that goal, while there are also trade-offs involved (i.e. non-desirable side effects) with any method we do choose. There will be disagreements, then, about effectiveness and about the extent to which we should tolerate negative side-effects. Just as it proves difficult to segregate economic power/status from political power/status, it proves difficult to segregate “administrative decisions” from “political decisions” (about which we expect and even welcome disagreement and spirited debate).

Arendt’s escape clause does not only entail adopting the idea of non-political administration. She also, again in a quasi-Marxist way, seems to believe we are living in, or are on the verge of living in, a post-scarcity society. Our productive capacities have now reached the point where poverty will be abolished if we just administer things correctly. For the first time in history, every person (not just the citizen, not just the make head of household, not just the non-slave) will have the leisure to step into the public arena as an equal among equals. The terrible reign of labor, the drudgery of producing the necessities of life, will come to an end.

To Arendt, unlike Marx, the terrible danger is not that this potential to end poverty will be derailed by an unequal distribution of the goods modern technology produces. She pays no heed to the economic imperatives—namely the drives to profit and accumulation—that will generate “poverty amidst plenty.” Rather, she is worried (in classic 1950s style) about the psychological pathologies of “consumer culture.” What she, with a mandarin distaste and disdain that links her to her supposed nemesis Adorno, rails against are bourgeois subjects so enthralled by consumer goods, by the baubles connected to an enhanced life (but still “life”), that they will willingly work harder and harder to buy more “labor-saving devices,” instead of using their potential liberation from labor to embrace (non-productive) political action and freedom. The moderns have lost their taste for, even any understanding of, “freedom,” and are addicted to “necessities”—ever more elaborate meals, houses, clothes etc.

On another hand, action is not entirely non-productive. What it produces is the conditions of its own possibility. (Arendt was nothing if not a Kantian; she is always attuned to enabling conditions.) By appearing together in a public square to speak and act is to constitute that public square. It does not exist except when we inhabit it together doing our thing. When we go back home, it dissolves. (Arendt is mostly antipathetic to institutions, associating them with a reification akin to rigor mortis. Certainly, she never really considers the nature of institutions—and the way that they can provide some kind of stability, even permanence, that what is transitory. She obviously greatly prefers the spontaneity of what is produced through actual interactions over the formal structures that people devise to give those spontaneous productions a chance to survive beyond the moment of their creation.) Arendt, in her most grandiloquent moments, calls that public sphere, that space of appearances, “the world.”

Quite basically, Arendt says we will have disaster if we do not have people who “love the world.” Practically, that means people who prefer the political action that produces the space of appearances over the pleasures of consumption. Non-productive action produces nothing except the political realm that makes that action possible. The circularity here can be head-ache inducing. Still, Arendt insists that there is something to be called “public happiness” and that happiness is the “lost treasure of revolutions.” It is a heady pleasure discovered in the “acting in concert” that is a political movement, and is a pleasure disconnected from whether the movement succeeds in achieving its stated goals or not. For Occupy, the focus on that pleasure, on that creation together of a space to occupy, made even enunciating goals irrelevant—and even threatening. The point was this space the occupiers had created, not some leverage toward change in some other space. Creating our own world was the point, not influencing some other world.

What Arendt fears, then, is that attachment to “life” means attachment to consuming, to the pleasures associated with satisfying bodily necessities. She wants to advocate for a different set, a different order, of desires, ones connected to sociality, to what can only come into being intersubjectively, collectively.

Thus Arendt, like Ruskin and Mill, is worried about an attachment to life that is overly bodily, or bestial. (I am thinking of Mill’s famous passage about a swinish life as not worthy of human beings.) We have a “higher” destiny for Arendt—and she is contemptuous of those for whom working toward acquiring a second car and a vacation home provides more than enough meaning in their lives. We can go even further, I think, and say that Arendt buys into the basic premise of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic. To be overly attached to life, to have nothing that you value enough above life to actually forfeit life to preserve that more valuable thing, is to be a slave. Life can’t be the highest value is you want to be human, to be more than a beast. There must be something you identify as unlivable, some set of conditions that you would not tolerate, and that you would die rather than endure. (In her later work, Arendt will associate this idea with Socrates, and insist that “when the chips are down,” the “moral” human would have chosen death over submission to the evil—no matter if understood as radical or banal—of the Nazis.) To return to the vocabulary of The Human Condition and On Revolution, to take “life” as the highest value is to chain oneself to “necessity.” Life compels; it confines us to “labor,” to the production of those necessities that sustain it. Freedom, the opposite of necessity, is only available to the person who refuses to cede life such power, who refuses to says that its claims trump all others. “The world” is one way Arendt designates that “other” to life, that something else to which we can pledge allegiance, which we can learn (?) to “love.”

The story doesn’t end there. There are issues of “organized remembrance” and “meaning” still to be addressed. So that’s where I am headed next.

Lives Worth Living

The dilemma: if we adopt a universal, egalitarian, minimalist standard, then every life should be preserved. To say that “every life” refers to all living things on the planet, we are proposing the impossible, enunciating an “ought” that is completely disconnected from “can.” The only real choice is between “letting Nature take its course” or intervening to over-rule what Nature would produce if left alone. Such interventions cannot, however, cannot avoid killing some creatures (whether it is antibiotics killing bacteria or protecting sheep from wolves and thus condemning the wolves to starvation or condemning the creatures the wolves will devour when they can’t get at the sheep). Interventions, in other words, always make a value judgment that some lives are more worth preserving than some other lives. We can’t slip the noose of death, altogether. Death will come—to all creatures in the long run. We can either let it come as it may—or shunt it in one direction or another, buying time for some creatures even as we reconcile ourselves to, or even actively promote, the death of other creatures.

Humanism, at its most basic, presumably, is a prejudice in favor of human lives over the lives of non-human creatures. Such a definition of humanism would make it strictly homologous with racism and sexism—namely the valuing of one category (a particular species or race or sex) over another.

Robinson Jeffers writes “I’d rather kill a man than a hawk.” A radical attempt to slough off humanism. But not a way to avoid judgment or standards. There are, presumably, reasons for preferring the hawk’s life to the human’s. So—to reiterate—it comes to seem impossible to just say that my ethic is to respect all life, to work to preserve every life. Since life feeds on life, some must die in order that others may live.

But there is another problem, one in a rather different register. Let’s assume a full-bore humanism for the moment. So now it might seem the ethic would be revised to say: all human lives are to be preserved, accepting the consequence that all non-human lives are to be sacrificed to the needs of human life prior to any sacrifice of one human life to preserve another human life. This universalist egalitarianism is “liberal” in many ways, although liberals like Martha Nussbaum and Judith Butler are made queasy by the thought of animal sacrifice for human life. Still, both of them are adamant that all human lives should be equally valued—or, to phrase it differently, for Nussbaum all humans have an equal right to live, while for Butler all human lives should be equally grievable.

Certainly for Nussbaum (and I suspect for Butler, but won’t pursue here how she would make her case) this equal right of all humans to live is only a minimum, a floor—and, as such, does not represent her full ethical ambitions. It is not just a life humans are entitled to. Each human has an equal claim on the means, resources, and liberty required to “flourish.” Nussbaum offers a detailed list of 10 things—ranging from food, shelter, leisure, and education, to family, friends, and health—one needs in order to flourish. Nussbaum is not arguing that “bare life” (to use Agamben’s term for “zoe”; Agamben is working from similar texts from Aristotle as those that inspire Nussbaum) is not worth living. But she is arguing there are non-minimalist ways of living that are superior to bare life. For Agamben, “bios” in Aristotle’s texts names this life that is more than “bare life.” And one crucial question is what kind of society, what kind of polity, enables the achievement of bios, of flourishing.

But I want to defer that political question for the moment and concentrate on the judgment, the standard, that justifies distinguishing bare life from flourishing. Because now we have a hierarchy within the set of all human lives. They are not all equal. Some are fuller, better, than others. One way of marking this difference would be to say that some lives are more satisfying than others. A life lived without the burden of chronic illness or fairly constant pain would be more enjoyable, easier to bear, even if not necessarily more fulfilling in other ways, than one lived in poor health. Another way of marking this difference would be to say that some lives are more meaningful than others. This second way seems to lead to issues (and ideas) of productivity. A meaningful life is given over to an activity that is deemed important (or significant)—and it has some success in achieving the important aims that it sets out to accomplish. We could say some lives are more admirable than others (in relation to the tasks that life is devoted to advancing and the success of those advancement efforts), just as (negatively) we can think of some lives as “wasted,” as having not made a very productive use of the time that person was allotted on earth.

The “liberal” solution to this dilemma, which introduces troubling (because unequal) distinctions among lives, is a) to try to distinguish between what is freely chosen by the individual and what is imposed from without, and b) to acknowledge a pluralism that realizes that “one man’s meat is another man’s poison.” The sum result of these two tenets is, basically, to say that material and other deprivations that limit the range of an individual’s life chances and choices are unacceptable—especially if others receive the material goods and social/educational/psychological opportunities denied to some. In practice, this usually comes to rest in the assertion that a strict equality of material goods and other kinds of opportunities is neither necessary nor achievable. But we can identify a “floor” of necessities (that is what Nussbaum 10 point list aims to do) that any “good” polity must provide if its citizens are all to enjoy a decent prospect of creating a flourishing life for themselves.

And the pluralism point says that—once that floor has been provided for all—the polity has no right to intervene in the choices people make about how to live their lives. Full bore tolerance is the only sensible approach to the variety of values that underlie people’s choices. Attempts to impose notions of meaning and importance can only lead to conflict. People are incredibly, perhaps congenitally, stubborn—which means that efforts to dictate how they should behave cause way more trouble than they are worth (because such efforts are rarely successful).

The Nussbaum position seems to me fairly unassailable. A good society should make available the means for flourishing. And her list of basic means is pretty convincing. A simple Kantian test works well here, in my opinion. Look at her list and consider which of its items I would willingly dispense with. Then consider on what grounds could I possibly deny to others any of those items. Why do I deserve something I would begrudge to others or, worse, claim that they did not deserve?

The most common candidate, of course, is work. I deserve something because I work for it. That slacker doesn’t deserve it. Don’t work, don’t eat. And that self-righteous distinction between effortful me and slacker him slides into the thrill of meting out punishment. If conservatives are obsessed with envy as the poison pill vice that afflicts all liberals, then leftists need to become equally obsessed with the sadistic desire to punish that is barely hidden within so much conservative moralism.

I want to finish up today’s thoughts by going in a different direction. What are we to do when the basic requirements for a flourishing life are not withheld by social and political arrangements, but by Nature itself? I speak out of personal experience here, but out of an experience more and more widely shared: witnessing old people outlive their lives, lingering on in debilitated physical and/or mental condition in ways that cruelly condemns them to live a life not worth living. Our humanist commitment to fighting against the death that Nature will eventually dole out, to delay as long we can, has the effect of sustaining a life that is worse than death. The values get completely inverted here. There are circumstances in which death is better than life. (Arendt made this point in her totalitarianism book in a most chilling way when she reminds us that certain kinds of torture can also make death preferable to continued life.)

I understand all the complexities of euthanasia and also understand all the legal safeguards put in place even in jurisdictions that allow assisted suicide. I don’t want to get into how to create a good euthanasia program here. What I want to assert—and I think this should be fairly uncontroversial although many would disagree—is that some lives are not worth living. We can—and should—be pluralistic here as well. A life that would be intolerable to me still might be well worth living for another. And maybe there are some people wo are—and can be—absolutists on this score. For them, any life, no matter how dire its circumstances and its debilities—is better than death. But it is certainly the case that there are also many people who find death preferable to certain lives.

This all makes me unhappy. I would like to take life as an absolute standard. But I am compelled by this logic to accept a) that we do judge among lives, finding some more satisfactory or significant than others (even if we want to protect against the polity devaluing some lives below a minimalist floor because other lives are worthier), and b) that in certain circumstances death is better than life.

In short, we can’t just leave it at “bare life” as a good all should have protected and preserved. Bare life is too bare—and in some cases so extremely bare that death is preferable.