A significant life: human meaning in a silent universe PDF
Preview A significant life: human meaning in a silent universe
A SignificAnt life to dd MAy A Significant Life Human Meaning in a Silent Universe the UniverSity of chicAgo PreSS Chicago and London todd MAy is Class of 1941 Memorial Professor of the Humanities at Clemson University. He is the author of many books, including Friendship in an Age of Economics, Contemporary Movements and the Thought of Jacques Rancière, and Death. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2015 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2015. Printed in the United States of America 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 1 2 3 4 5 iSBn- 13: 978- 0- 226- 23567- 7 (cloth) iSBn- 13: 978- 0- 226- 23570- 7 (e- book) doi: 10.7208/chicago/9780226235707.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data May, Todd, 1955– author. A significant life : human meaning in a silent universe / Todd May. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. iSBn 978-0-226-23567-7 (cloth : alk. paper) — iSBn 978-0-226-23570-7 (e-book) 1. Philosophical anthropology. 2. Meaning (Philosophy) 3. Life. 4. Conduct of life. I. Title. Bd450.M335 2015 128—dc23 2014023736 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of AnSi/niSo Z39.48– 1992 (Permanence of Paper). cont entS Introduction vii 1 • A Meaningful Life? 1 2 • Is Happiness Enough? 25 3 • Narrative Values 61 4 • Meaningful Lives, Good Lives, Beautiful Lives 105 5 • Justifying Ourselves to Ourselves 139 Conclusion: Not Everything, But Something 175 Acknowledgments 185 Notes 187 Suggestions for Further Reading 191 Index 195 introdUction I grew up in New York City, two blocks from the Museum of Natural History. I recall, many years ago, when the current Hall of African Peoples was constructed. The first time I entered it I was struck, for under the arch through which one enters the exhibit is inscribed the words “One is born, one dies, the land increases.” Those words haunted me then, and they haunt me still. Is it true that that’s all there is? That we are nothing more than a long way around from loam to loam? Is there some reason for my being here except to live out my allotted time, to burn my days alongside others who are, in turn, burning theirs? It was that puzzle, that concern, that gnawing bewilderment, that led me along the path of literature and eventually philosophy. We often ask ourselves questions like these when we think about our own death. There comes a time in the lives of most of us when the outlines of the far shore become more distinct than those of the shore from which we set out. We look back- ward and see life as a quarter over, half over, or nearly done. And we wonder, what have we made of ourselves? What have we been about? Whatever we have done to arrive at this mo- ment, we have less time to alter it than we had to get here. We won’t get a full do- over. Have we lived as we ought, or as we might? Have our lives been not just good, but meaningful? [ vii ] Was there a point to them, or will there be? Or will we instead lie on our deathbed and say to ourselves, “It was the wrong life. I should have lived differently”? After all, if there is a meaning to our living— or, if our lives are to be meaningful— then we don’t have forever to find it. It is not as though that far coast will keep receding before us, allowing us a century or two to tinker at trifles here or there in the meantime. Indeed, we need to discover that meaning, or have it revealed to us, or perhaps even create it, in the limited and yet undetermined time that is our portion. However, although death may motivate us to ask about the meaningfulness of life, it is not necessary for the question to arise. It can emerge in other ways, confronting us through other venues. The French philosopher Albert Camus writes of something similar which he calls a feeling of the absurd. “It happens that the stage sets collapse. Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm—t his path is easily followed most of the time. But then one day the ‘why’ arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement.”1 Weariness tinged with amazement. The weight of the rhythm exhausts us, seems grinding where it once seemed natural, or didn’t seem like anything, just background noise. At the same time we are perplexed by this rhythm, by the fact that we never noticed, or even that it was there at all. The fact of our being here, having gone through these motions for all these years without having noticed their pointlessness, grips us at the same time it bears down upon us. For me, it first happened on the subway in New York. Coming home from high school, gazing over the faces of my Introduction [ viii ] fellow passengers, each staring into the middle distance; one day everything suddenly became futile. My life began to feel remote. The elderly Chinese lady across from me, nodding off every few seconds while trying to keep her shopping bags propped between her knees; the business man solemnly read- ing his folded copy of the New York Times; a teenager in jeans and a leather jacket trying to look intimidating: weren’t we all just playing roles? As Shakespeare had it, we are all certainly just strutting and fretting our time upon the stage in a grand play. But who then is our audience and what, if anything, do our roles matter? For Camus, these feelings of pointless rhythms or of death’s inevitability are only the symptoms of the absurd. The absurd itself is something very precise. It is the confrontation of our need for meaning with the unwillingness of the universe to yield it to us. Humans need reasons; we need to know that there is some point to going on. The universe, however, is silent. It does not speak, or if it does, it is in a language we do not understand. It is not that there necessarily is no meaning. Perhaps there is. But if there is, it is inaccessible to us. Science might give us explanations. It might tell us why things are the way they are. But science does not yield meaning. That is not its job. And if we are to understand what the universe has on offer, where else could we turn? Camus thought we have nowhere else to turn. We must live within the indifference of the universe, or better within the constant confrontation of our need for meaning with the universe’s steadfast silence. It is a matter of remaining in this condition of dual refusal: our refusal to give up the quest for meaning and the universe’s refusal to offer it to us. Everything else, he thought, is a form of suicide. If we can Introduction [ ix ]
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