Category: philosophy

Panpsychism and the Philosophers Pondering Consciousness

“In a 2019 essay David Chalmers notes that when he was in graduate school, there was a saying about philosophers. ‘One starts as a materialist, then one becomes a dualist, then a panpsychist, and one ends up an idealist.’ Although Chalmers cannot account for where the truism originated, he argues that its logic is more or less intuitive. In the beginning one is impressed by the success of science and its ability to reduce everything to causal mechanism. Then, once it becomes clear that materialism has not managed to explain consciousness, dualism begins to seem more attractive. Eventually, the inelegance of dualism leads one to a greater appreciation for the inscrutability of matter, which leads to an embrace of panpsychism. By taking each of these frameworks to their logical unsatisfying conclusions, ‘one comes to think that there is little reason to believe in anything beyond consciousness and that the physical world is wholly constituted by consciousness.’ This is idealism.” (Quoted from Meghan O’Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning, first paragraph of Chapter 10, publication date: 2021).

I take Chalmers here to be joking, to be offering this little journey as a reductio. What could be more absurd, more illustrative of human pretension, than to end up claiming consciousness is all there is? We spin the whole universe out of our own brains.

But Chalmers is a philosopher—so maybe I am wrong and he is dead serious. (My last two posts have considered how seriously philosophers are addicted to being serious.) Ever since Thales philosophers have been searching for that one definitive thing that everything else boils down to. The perennial problem of the One and the Many. The search for some fundamental stuff is on.

Note the language of the quoted passage. Nothing about how what we encounter is experience contributes to the position a philosopher takes. At issue is whether a claim is logical, if it avoids being “inelegant.” Yes, there is a nod to that one mysterious phenomenon—consciousness—that throws a spanner in the works. How can it be explained, accounted for? Only, the joke goes, by asserting its dominance over all the rest.

My beef here has three prongs. First, philosophers believe they can think their way to the answer. Quantum theory alone should suggest that “logic” and “elegance” and “non-contradiction” are not likely to win the day when trying to explain “inscrutable matter.”

Two, the search for a “primitive.” Most philosophers start out with a strong bias toward some version of monism. It’s just a question of identifying the correct basic thing from which all else emanates. Except for a few apostates (and it is one of the glories of the philosophic tradition that it constantly generates dissidents), most philosophers abhor dualism, not to mention the messy horror that is pluralism. The inelegance of dualism just fries their order-seeking souls.

Here’s a wonderful William James passage on the philosopher’s avoidance of mess.

“The world of concrete personal experiences to which the street belongs is multitudinous beyond imagination. The world to which your philosophy-professor introduces you is simple, clean, and noble. The contradictions of real life are absent from it. Its architecture is classic. Principles of reason trace its outlines, logical necessities cement its parts. Purity and dignity are what it most expresses. It is a kind of marble temple shining on a hill. In point of fact it is less an account of the actual world than a clear addition built upon it, a classic sanctuary in which the rationalist may take refuge from the intolerably confused and gothic character which mere facts present. It is no explanation of our concrete universe, it is another thing altogether, a substitute for it, a remedy, a way of escape” (Pragmatism, p. 15 in the Penguin edition.)

Third, the focus on origins, on the generative. William James said that his pragmatism concerned itself not with “first things,” but with consequences, with the “fruits” of experience or situations. He offers “an attitude of orientation: . . . the attitude of looking away from first things, principles, ‘categories,’ supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts” (p. 29, Pragmatism, Penguin Edition).

James, of course, was living in the aftermath of the Darwinian revolution—which should mean, among many other things, introducing a strong dose of temporality into our accounts of how we got to our current pass. Panpsychism—the notion that consciousness is inherent in all matter—seems to me to have given up on the possibility of telling any kind of evolutionary story about how consciousness comes into existence. Rather, since we have consciousness now, it must have always been there. Yes, I understand that the panpsychist will say it was only there in potential, that everything necessary for its emergence was always already in place, but that it would take certain triggering events to bring it into full actual presence. The principled claim here is that all the materials of life are there from the outset; there can be nothing new. Matter can neither be created nor destroyed. Take that claim as axiomatic and panpsychism stands on fairly solid ground.

The panpsychist is then at one with Spinoza. There is an eternal substance and all that history yields are modes in which that substance is expressed (or instantiated). But everything can be traced back to that substance.

I am disinclined to this position. I am agnostic as to whether new matter can come into existence as opposed to an assertion that it was all there from the start. Which means I want to avoid some kind of substance/mode distinction where “substance” is the real stuff and “mode” just some emanation of substance. I want to avoid that kind of appearance/reality distinction altogether. What appears is real—as is evidenced by one’s responses to and engagements with what appears. To ask if what appears is “really real” seems fruitless to me (a deliberate echo of James’ injunction to look to the “fruits” of things, not their origin.) The key point is that the interactions of the “stuff” of which the world and experience is made keeps yielding novelties that exceed the ability of our principles or theories to predict. Theories, as what James calls “answers to enigmas” (Pragmatism, p. 28), always (finally) disappoint, always fail to answer our questions—because they always reduce complexity and multitudiousness to simplicities that don’t, when push comes to shove, do the job. The world exceeds the intellectual models we construct in an attempt to encompass it. There is, James insists, always “more.”

All of which is to say that consciousness emerges in particular circumstances and through particular interactions. Figuring out the actual form of that emergence has proved remarkably difficult—the “hard problem” that Chalmers famously identified almost forty years ago now. I will be discussing in subsequent posts some of these emergentist accounts.

For now, I will just identify two tracks on which the hard problem has been approached. The first is bio-chemical. There has been remarkable progress in setting out the bio-chemical processes by which sight works. What has proved more elusive (as Chalmers indicated) is nailing down the bio-chemical processes by which I self-consciously understand that I am currently seeing something. It’s this experience of an experiencing self that continues to defy a bio-chemical account. (With the consequence that some strict materialists then argue that this “self-consciousness” is an illusion. If the science can’t account for it, then it must not exist.)

The second track is Darwinian, where the effort is focused on providing an evolutionary account of the emergence of consciousness. The panpsychists are not necessarily opposed to a Darwinian account. They are just committed to insisting that some rudimentary consciousness is—or, even more minimally, the necessary ingredients for the recipe for consciousness being enacted are—always already present. What I am saying is that I don’t see 1) how it makes any difference if those elements were there from the beginning or only emerge later on and 2) how we could ever adjudicate disputes about this assertion about origins. Hence my agnosticism. And my suspicion that it’s one of the professional deformations of philosophy to spend so much time obsessing about getting an account of an origin that is also monistic. The messy world unfolds irrespective of whether there is some “fundamental stuff” and whether that stuff has always been there.

My position: matter is multi-faceted; its components share no fundamental, essential quality (so, for example, living and non-living things are both, in some sense, matter, but the differences between rocks and giraffes are more significant than some very abstract similarity they share); and the interactions among elements of this multitudinous matter keep producing things that surprise us, that are novelties. Probabilities are the best we can do by way of predicting the results of those interactions; there is not some straight-forward line of causation from origin point A to produced result E (with our being able to trace the path through B, C, and D that got us there.) Of course, after the fact we can often trace that path from A to E. But before the fact, E was only one possible outcome of starting from A, and we might be able to assess the probability of E’s occurrence, but cannot guarantee it—unless we stringently control what interactions A enters into. It is precisely the multiple things with which A will interact that makes prediction so uncertain once we are beyond laboratory controls.

Does that leave me throwing up my hands, and joining the likes of Colin McGinn and John Searle, who tend to believe we will never have a satisfactory account of consciousness. Certainly the insistence that “you scientists are guilty of hubris when you set out to explain everything” is familiar ground for humanists. “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

I don’t think that’s where I want to take my stand. There are, it seems to me, interesting things to say about consciousness, about its qualities, its emergence, its capabilities, about what enhances it and what disables it. I will try to consider some of these is subsequent posts. My point here is that panpsychism has just about nothing to say about these more concrete issues: that is, the capabilities of consciousness and how they can be activated or thwarted. Panpsychism exists on way too abstract a level, trying to answer global questions about origins and possibility that have little bite, little consequence, when more specific questions are taken up. And that I think the development of a theory like panpsychism comes from the philosopher’s bias toward identifying ultimate building blocks of the universe, a bias that yields speculation about fairly unanswerable questions, but (more crucially) yields answers that contribute little to more concrete engagements with the elements of experience.

To ask the William James question: what would be different about our experience of consciousness (and how we act as conscious beings) if panpsychism were true instead of dualism? I don’t see how it would make any difference at all. I might say: nice to know that consciousness is out there potentially in all matter (maybe I shouldn’t, like Dr. Johnson, kick rocks), but that offers me nothing in regards to how I think about my own consciousness and how I wish to activate it. It doesn’t help in the least for addressing the perplexing questions of how consciousness varies among the wide range of living creatures, from molds through plants through insects through vertebrates to humans.

I set out writing this post with the title “Panpsychism and Moral Realism.” But, obviously, never got to moral realism. So I will write about moral realism before eventually moving on to what seem to me more enlightening approaches than panpsychism to the enigmas of consciousness.

Seriously (2)

A few additional thoughts on the charge that someone is not being serious.

To say “you are not serious” is probably best understood as expressing the assertion that “I do not take you seriously.” And that assertion justifies me in not engaging with the reasons or beliefs that underwrite your position. I refuse to consider those reasons and beliefs as worthy of any consideration, or any respect. They—and you—can be dismissed out of hand. I stand on solid ground, you have no standing at all. Whatever reasons you think you have for acting that way, or believing what you say you believe, are frivolous and insubstantial.

The further twist (in some cases) is that “your stated reasons” cannot (because so insubstantial) really be the reasons (the motives, the causes) for your behavior. You are not “serious” in offering that account of your action because any thoughtful person would recognize how flimsy, how implausible, those reasons are. You are being disingenuous, pretending to be offering a sincere account of why you act this way or believe this thing, when you are in fact dissembling.

And you are dissembling either because you are not willing to publicly embrace (affirm) your real reasons/motive or because you are an unreflective person, totally out of touch with your real reasons and motives. Or, the other way around, you are pretending to believe something that you can’t really believe—and that your actions show that you don’t really believe. You are stubbornly holding onto an intellectual position the consequences of which cannot be lived. (This is Gaita’s response to skepticism.)

My thoughts about my non-serious grad school colleagues took, I think, this form: they were unserious because they were avoiding (for any number of reasons) actually thinking about what they were up to and where they were trying to get to. It was too scary to take stock, to clearly consider what they desired, and then to think about what actions would move them closer to the realization of those desires. Better to live in a haze than to commit wholeheartedly to something they might fail to achieve. A kind of self-protective diffidence.

Flipping back to the one who makes the charge “you are not serious.” What is withheld is respect for the other person. I don’t respect your choices, your actions, or your stated reasons/motives when I declare you are not serious. And that means I take myself off the hook from any effort to empathize, any effort to understand who you are and what moves you to act and believe as you do. The charge is dismissive in ways that border on cruelty—and the charge is also, I am insisting, in bad faith when trotted out in any dialogic situation. It shuts down any possibility of an exchange of views, of an opening up of minds on either side of a disagreement. To say “you are not serious” is simply a form of dogmatism. I am right, you are wrong—and so wrong that you can’t seriously believe what you are saying. You can only be saying it disingenuously or out of lamentable (but blameworthy) ignorance.

It is this element of contemptuous dismissal that bugs me so much about the way philosophers use the word “serious.” And so proudly, so self-righteously, as if it was the ultimate refutation of the other’s position. I really do not think that non-philosophers retreat to a charge of “non-seriousness” as often as philosophers do.

Gaita (5): Seriously?

“Socrates called his partners in conversation to a kind of seriousness. They could respond to that call only if they spoke in an effort of disciplined lucidity out of what they had made of themselves. That does not mean that he wanted them to voice their sincere personal opinion. Their sincere personal opinion was worthless unless constrained by the discipline of thought and character which conditions the proper contrast between what is personal and what is impersonal in moral thought and discussion” (Raimond Gaita, Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception, 2^nd edition, 2004, p. 275; my italics).

Lots to unpack here. At a minimum, an effort to attain “lucidity”—and “disciplined thought”—are required to be accorded the accolade of “serious” for Gaita. And one hallmark of seriousness is attention to one’s character, to the integrity and unity of that character, to the way it develops over time, and is instantiated in one’s actions, especially the way one treats others. Furthermore, morality attains “impersonality,” a kind of validity that transcends a merely personal sense of right and wrong, when one approaches moral questions with disciplined thought. Only that way could a moral claim actually carry any obligation for someone beyond the self. Socrates in the dialogues is working to establish articulations of morality that carry weight (may even ascend to a right to be called “true”) for everyone.

Gaita, in fact, seems utterly incapable of presenting the most central planks of his thought without the word “serious” slipped in. Here’s two examples:

“When we ask what makes a principle a moral principle, a rule a moral rule, an obligation a moral obligation—then I think we should seek a least some part of the answer in the kind of elaboration we give when we express most seriously our sense of what it means to wrong someone. Nowhere is that sense more sober than in lucid remorse” (xxi.)

“The concept of goodness is closely tied to need, to being responsive to the needs of others. Simone Weil went so far as to say that all obligation is tied to need. That is to link two notions of necessity—moral necessity and the necessity of need. Whether one wishes to go so far, it seems to me that she is clearly right in thinking that moral necessity is (conceptually) tied (not always directly) to what is inescapably serious in life” (90).

You always know a philosopher is at ground zero of his thinking when the term “necessity” is trotted out. There’s the hard stuff: the inescapable. That to which you must pay heed. If you ignore it, you are not serious. (Please hear John McEnroe ringing in your head at this point.)

I am on record as hating the way philosophers deploy the terms “necessity” and “serious.” I think 95% of such uses are question-begging. Those terms simply plant a flag where the philosopher has run out of arguments against some opposing position. That other position will be dismissed as “not serious.” Gaita devotes the whole last chapter of his book to denouncing various philosophical positions (including moral skepticism) as non-serious and corrupt. I wish some wise editor had told him that this chapter is a terrible way to end his superb—and often inspiring—book. Here’s a good sample of the sputtering that characterizes that final chapter:

“It seems that we cannot take seriously the idea that people could reject or even question the reality of evil . . . merely because they have thought themselves to such a position—no more than we can take seriously the idea that genuine despair could issue merely from an argument that concluded that life is meaningless. There are many different kinds of propositions that cannot be seriously asserted, or seriously asserted as the conclusions of a process of reasoning. I have called them, disparagingly, ‘blackboard conclusions,’ because a proposition which cannot seriously be asserted, or one which we take to be asserted seriously only when we see that it was not and could not be the outcome only of thought, is a conclusion in a secondary sense” (316-317). Six uses of the word “serious” in three sentences! I think he protests too much.

Certainly, you can offer reasons why you will not engage with someone else’s thoughts and beliefs. They may prove uninteresting to you or offer you no point of entry for engagement. But trotting out the charge that they are not “serious” does no work at all. To say Sidney Powell was not “serious” when she proffered her claims about the election of 2020 being “stolen” adds nothing. It’s just another way of saying you think she is wrong—with perhaps the additional claim that she is insincere when advancing those claims. But you need to provide evidence and reasons for the conclusion that the election was not stolen—and for the conclusion that she, in fact, knows that her claims otherwise are false. Throwing around the term “not serious” is not part of that work. In fact, the “not serious” charge absolves you from doing that work. As I have said, one is not obliged to respond to every position someone out there is taking. But dismissing such positions as “not serious,” while a convenient short cut, is simply a refusal to engage, not an actual (dare I say not a “serious”) refutation of a position.

Similarly, as I have written in the past, philosophers repeatedly in my view appeal to “false” necessities. It is one of the professional deformations of philosophy that its work is oriented to identifying a bedrock of necessity. (That’s why it is pretty comical that Gaita claims his position in “non-foundational,” but then can go on to talk of “moral necessity,” and the “necessity of needs,” and the “absolute” obligation that the preciousness of every human individual imposes on us. And can insist we are “not serious” when we don’t pay attention to what is “inescapably serious” in a human life.) Wherever a philosopher identifies a “necessity” is exactly where we should begin any examination of his thought and the ways in which it is warranted.

More globally, I suspect that “necessities” tend to over-simplify, to work to gather within a single framework what is a diverse range of phenomena that don’t actually all boil down to being rooted in the same overarching necessity. I have always taken Wittgenstein’s attack on essentialism, on the idea that everything we call a “game” shares some essential quality in common, to advocate for a pluralism that finds appeals to necessity suspect. J. L. Austin makes the same point in his usual wry way:

“And is it complicated? Well, it is complicated a bit; but life and truth and things do tend to be complicated. It’s not things, it’s philosophers that are simple. You will have heard it said, I expect, that over-simplification is the occupational disease of philosophers, and in a way one might agree with that. But for a sneaking suspicion that it’s their occupation” (“Performative Utterances,” last paragraph of that essay).

Ruling certain positions out of bounds as “not serious” is just a way of narrowing down the complexities of human behavior, reasoning, and beliefs.

OK. My antipathy to the habitual use of “serious” as a gate keeper for many philosophers is clear enough. But now I want to shift ground and consider how Gaita makes me wonder if the term “serious” points me toward something I want to (for lack of a better phrase) take seriously.

Here’s the issue for me. I went to grad school with a number of people whose lives seemed to me to be adrift. I was very focused: I wanted to get my degree and I wanted to have a career as a college teacher. Similarly, I was in a committed relationship which I thought of as having no end point (turns out I was wrong about that.) In short, I was very earnest, very goal directed, very invested in what I was doing. I could be characterized as “serious.” I also, I think it is fair to say, had a fairly strong sense of “integrity.” There were things I would not allow myself to do because I believed not just that they were wrong, but that they besmirched my sense of myself, would undermine my self-respect. I would have called such things shabby, or beneath me, or unworthy of the kind of person I took myself to be. Was I a prig? No doubt, but what I am trying to express here was that I had a strong sense of self, of who I was and who I wanted to be—and that sense of self governed a lot of my choices and actions. In short, I aspired to the kind of “unity” of character and faithfulness to that character that Gaita associates with Socrates. (More on Socrates in a bit.)

It is this kind of “seriousness” to which Gaita appeals when trying to flesh out his sense that every individual is precious—and thus obliges us to care for them (with the full resonance of what “care” means, i.e. an object of concern that calls for our active work to promote its well-being.) “We must not only see that someone has ‘projects and categorical desires with which that person is identified.’ [The quote is from Bernard Williams.] We must be able to take those desires and projects, and so him, seriously. This is a condition of his having the kind of individuality that we mark by speaking of his irreplaceability” (153).

Within these terms, some of my fellow grad students, I think it fair to say, did not take life seriously. They were not bound to projects and desires that were the cornerstones of their identities. They had no strong sense of identity at all—and thus had only the most nebulous of “projects.” They vaguely wanted to get their PhD, but were not making any progress toward that goal. There was a kind of magical thinking here. I am standing at point A and say to myself that some day I will be standing at point D. I may firmly believe that point D will be my position sometime in the future—and claim to be deeply committed to getting there. But I am doing nothing that will actually get me from point A to point D. I am adrift. Similarly, I am sleeping with E, F, or G, but only casually, with no sense that my life is entangled with theirs, or that we have some kind of partnership.

I don’t want to be misunderstood here. I am not saying that monogamy, some form of committed and open-ended relationship, is the only kind to be considered “proper” or “morally” acceptable. What I am trying to get at is living a life in which one does things (goes to classes, has friends and sexual partners, works as a barista in order to pay the rent) that are not expected to “add up” to anything in particular, that are done in relation to immediate imperatives, but are not seen as having any long-term consequences (or only in the most vague way)—and are certainly not viewed in relation to some notion of one’s character, of one’s selfhood, of one’s considered way of being-in-the-world and with others.

Again, I want to do justice to the full diversity of human desires and needs. It would be absurd to say that everyone wants a committed relationship or a PhD. What I am trying to get at are lives lived without any kind of attention to desires one is committed to. I am tempted to say: my “unserious” friends were handicapped by having learned (no matter how) that they were unworthy of having desires—or of straight-forwardly pursuing them. Another version: you could say they simply didn’t know what they wanted, and were just trying things out. In either of these two cases, what they lacked was a strong sense of self, an idea of who they were and of how that identity could then be expressed through their actions. They weren’t acting seriously because they didn’t take themselves seriously.

Lots of possible reasons for not taking oneself seriously. Having imbibed the notion that self-assertion is wrong. Fearing failure; feeling like one wasn’t capable to achieving things that looked attractive from afar, but which one had no idea of how to actually achieve; feeling out of place in an environment where the expectations and unwritten rules were an almost complete mystery; diffidence of all kinds; lack of self confidence etc. etc.

What I want to emphasize, however, is the way that such “unseriousness” goes along with a disbelief in the consequences of action. Since I am pretty much a non-entity, then the things that I do make little to no impact on the world, on others, and (perhaps most importantly) on myself. Nothing comes of my actions. Nothing connects up. I am just going from day to day, dealing with what is throws in my path. This has the superficial attraction of the grasshopper life in Aesop’s fable, but is really underwritten by a failure to take myself seriously, a failure to believe I am anything of account. I am adrift—and nothing I do matters.

I think Gaita’s reflections on Socrates push in this direction. Recall his announced “strong commitment to a version of the Socratic claim that an unexamined life—a life that does not rise to a requirement to be lucid about its meaning(s)—is unworthy of a human life” (xxii). Unless we are “serious” in this sense, we have done less with our life than we should have. We have not risen to the occasion that life affords us, we have fallen short of being “worthy” or admirable.

No matter how much I bristle as such moralism, at its arrogant scolding tone, I do have to admit that some lives are more admirable than others, more worthy of emulation. Are those lives characterized by “lucid” reflection, by an ever-vigilant examination of “its meaning(s)?” I am not sure. Temperament, forbearance, kindness all seem crucial here—and I am not sure any of those things are products of reflection, or even require reflection for their presence.

But I do think Gaita may well be right that some kind of image of self that cannot be violated without a strong sense of disquiet is important here. An investment in a certain form of integrity, an investment underwritten by a strong sense of self (both the self I am and the self I aspire to be), if not a sine non qua of an admirable life does seem to offer a strong support of efforts to live that life. Gaita turns to Socrates’s “point . . . that there are things which are impossible to do even though no obstacles of the kind which may be overcome with force, efforts of will or ingenious strategies stand in the way” (292). Rather, the impossibility comes from the fact that doing that action would utterly devastate the agent, completely dissolve his lived understanding of who he is, leave him being nothing at all—or with the despair of self-contempt.

Within these terms, Gaita spends a long time trying to defend Socrates’ claim that “it is better to suffer evil than to do it.” His exposition of his reasoning here is meandering and often (at least for me) hard to follow. But the core is that to do evil would be to violate an identity on which one’s whole sense of one’s life (its significance, its integrity, its unity, its worthiness) is based. If I cannot respect myself, I have no place to stand. I will be devastated. And it seems that if I am not someone who could be devastated in that way, then I am someone who is not taking his life “seriously.” I neither have a sense of an identity in which I am invested, nor a sense of actions being possible violations of that identity. I am (it is only a slight exaggeration to say) no one.

I don’t know what to do with this line of thinking. It seems harsh to me, using “seriousness,” and “lucidity,” and “integrity,” and “the examined life” as clubs to beat the vast unwashed unworthies. Yet I suspect that some sense of integrity, some sensibility that responds to some possible actions as things “it is impossible for me to do” simply because of “who I am,” is central to ethics, to my distinctive answer to what is the best way for me to live my life. And it does seem “unserious” to simply never consider the question of “how I should live my life,” to simply drift through life, taking it as it comes.

I am going to end my engagement with Gaita here. Certainly, we can say that my “unserious” fellow grad students did little harm in the world. They may have heedlessly hurt others or themselves, but the extent of the harm they did was very limited. The harms being done currently by Russia, Israel, and Hamas encompass evils that Gaita’s account seems woefully inadequate to even contemplate, no less explain or ameliorate. Killings that do not generate an ounce of remorse are way outside his ken. It is one thing to be careless and/or thoughtless about the hurt one inflicts on others. It is quite another thing to actively and deliberately act to harm others. Such acts of harm are not heedless, nor the product of a lack of reflection. They are chosen quite self-consciously.

Gaita 4: A Meaningful Life

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; 2^nd. 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.