Why Philosophy Matters : 20 Lessons on Living Large [1 ed.] 9781443883580, 9781443891288

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Why Philosophy Matters

Why Philosophy Matters: 20 Lessons on Living Large By

Raymond Angelo Belliotti

Why Philosophy Matters: 20 Lessons on Living Large By Raymond Angelo Belliotti This book first published 2015 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2015 by Raymond Angelo Belliotti All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-7643-7 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-7643-8

To Marcia, Angelo and Vittoria

Meglio onore senza vita che vita senza onore (“Better to have honor without life than life without honor” or “Better to die with honor than to live with shame”)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface ........................................................................................................ ix Acknowledgments ...................................................................................... xi Introduction .............................................................................................. xiii List of Abbreviations ............................................................................... xvii Chapter One ................................................................................................. 1 Building Character 1. Luxuriate in the Process of Life: Friedrich Nietzsche........................ 1 2. Relish Freedom: Jean-Paul Sartre .................................................... 11 3. Appreciate that Virtue is its own Reward: Plato and Dante ............. 17 4. Take Responsibility for What is in Your Control: Stoicism ............ 22 5. Develop a Sense of Honor: Marcus Tullius Cicero.......................... 33 6. Be Authentic: Martin Heidegger ...................................................... 46 Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 51 Forging Personal Relationships 7. Welcome Friendship: Aristotle ........................................................ 51 8. Nurture Love: Plato.......................................................................... 59 9. Examine What We Owe Others: Peter Singer ................................. 68 Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 85 Promoting Sound Political Strategies 10. Unravel the Problem of Dirty Hands: Niccolò Machiavelli ........... 85 11. Incite Political and Cultural Transformation: Antonio Gramsci .. 100 12. Go Beyond Communism and Capitalism: Roberto Unger ........... 106

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To Marcia, Angelo and Vittoria

Chapter Four ............................................................................................ 121 Living Meaningfully 13. Transform Your Destiny: Albert Camus ...................................... 121 14. Promote Creativity: Karl Marx .................................................... 130 15. Seek Fulfillment: Arthur Schopenhauer....................................... 134 16. Evaluate Pleasure and Ponder Meaning: Robert Nozick.............. 140 17. Assess Happiness: Raymond Angelo Belliotti ............................. 150

Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 163 Dying Gracefully 18. Value Biographical Lives: James Rachels ................................... 163 19. Consider Posthumous Harm and Benefit: Joel Feinberg.............. 168 20. Defy the Grim Reaper: Blaise Pascal ........................................... 188 Notes........................................................................................................ 197 Bibliography ............................................................................................ 203 Index ........................................................................................................ 211

PREFACE

In September 2012, the philosophy department of which I am a member met with the Dean of Arts and Sciences for what everyone thought would be a routine session designed to put the finishing touches on a required five-year review of our academic unit. The external reviewer had given us high marks, our department enjoyed generally collegial relations, and all of our members were held in high regard by the undergraduates we taught. The Dean, who often struggled with keeping his less admirable emotions in check, was somehow aroused by an innocuous comment uttered by one of my colleagues. The subject was collaborative research— students and instructors joining forces to advance the literature in their field. We expressed extreme doubt that undergraduates were prepared to contribute meaningfully to our research, especially given the fact that we had no straightforward empirical studies upon which they might labor. Then one of us added that “it took me many years of study before I could compose a publishable philosophical essay.” This did not strike the rest of us as provocative in the least. Indeed, if anything, the statement expressed a trivial truth. But the Dean was strangely agitated. He accused the department of having a “superior” attitude. Soon thereafter he cited an article written by Stanley Fish in the New York Times that concluded that philosophy does not matter to everyday life. As you might suspect, the session degenerated thereafter. Gratuitously insulting one’s audience is typically not a sound recipe for productive dialogue. Months later, recalling that meeting with the Dean, I decided to read Fish’s essay. The following captures the gist of his position: But philosophy is not the name of, or the site of, thought generally; it is a special, insular form of thought and its propositions have weight and value only in the precincts of its game . . . The conclusions reached in philosophical disquisitions do not travel. They do not travel into contexts that are not explicitly philosophical (as seminars, academic journals, and conferences are), and they do not even make their way into the nonphilosophical lives of those who hold them (New York Times, The Opinion Page, “Does Philosophy Matter?” August 1, 2011).

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My first reaction was to wonder: If Fish is correct, how could such giants in the history of ideas such as Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Dante, Epicurus, and the like have been so deluded as to think that philosophical disputation was central to determining how human beings should live their lives? Worse, how could this delusion persist throughout the centuries and be promoted by thinkers such as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Camus, and Sartre? Even worse, how could contemporary philosophers such as Robert Nozick, Joel Feinberg, Roberto Unger, and Peter Singer not have seen through the ruse? In fairness, Fish’s attack may have been directed to only certain types of meta-ethical and meta-epistemological questions. His essay focuses on the debate between moral relativists and moral absolutists, and concludes that a person’s philosophical position on this issue will not affect his or her practical moral decisions. (I would argue that is not always the case.) Still, Fish presents his conclusions generally and expresses no appreciation for the practical benefits of philosophical reasoning. While Fish’s conclusions warm the bosom of our contentious Dean, I find them grossly exaggerated and wildly irresponsible. Such is the genesis of this work, which is designed to be true to its title: philosophy does matter to everyday living. In my judgment, people who ignore the enduring, fundamental questions of life thereby unwittingly relinquish part of their humanity. I hope to convince readers of this foundational truth.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Numerous people contributed to this work directly or indirectly. As always, my family comes first. Thanks to Marcia, Angelo, and Vittoria for being my one, true thing. I am grateful to Camilla Harding, acquisitions editor, and Sam Baker, commissioning editor, for their faith in and commitment to this project. Finally, thanks to Joanne Foeller, an expert of book formatting who corrected my numerous errors and prepared the final manuscript with unmatched efficiency and grace. Finally, I thank the following publishers for their permission to reprint and adapt material from my previously published work: From Happiness is Overrated © 2004 by permission of Rowman & Littlefield, 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, MD 20706; From Roman Philosophy and the Good Life © 2009 by permission of Lexington Books, 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, MD 20706; From Niccolò Machiavelli: The Laughing Lion and The Strutting Fox © 2009 by permission of Lexington Books, 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, MD 20706; From Posthumous Harm: Why the Dead are Still Vulnerable © 2012 by permission of Lexington Books, 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, MD 20706; From Justifying Law: The Debate over Foundations, Goals, and Methods © 1992 by permission of Temple University Press, 1852 N. 10th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19122; From Seeking Identity: Individualism and Community in an Ethnic Context © 1995 by permission of University Press of Kansas, 2502 Westbrooke Circle, Lawrence, KS 66045; From Watching Baseball, Seeing Philosophy: The Great Thinkers at Play on the Diamond © 2008 Raymond Angelo Belliotti by permission of McFarland & Company, Inc. Box 611, Jefferson NC 28640; From What is the Meaning of Human Life? © 2001 by permission of Rodopi Editions, BRILL Publishing, P.O. Box 9000, 2300 PA, Leiden, The Netherlands; From Jesus or Nietzsche: How Should We Live Our Lives? © 2013 by permission of Rodopi Editions, BRILL Publishing, P.O. Box 9000, 2300 PA, Leiden, The Netherlands;

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Acknowledgments

From Shakespeare and Philosophy: Lust, Love, and Law© 2012 by permission of Rodopi Editions, BRILL Publishing, P.O. Box 9000, 2300 PA, Leiden, The Netherlands; From Dante’s Deadly Sins: Moral Philosophy in Hell © 2011 by permission of Wiley-Blackwell, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ UK.

INTRODUCTION

The question—“How should I live my life?”—along with cosmological inquiries about the nature of the world, animated Western philosophy during its earliest recorded years. Given that belief in the Greek and Roman gods failed to provide substantive guidelines for everyday living, philosophy arose in large measure as practical instruction in the art of living the good human life. Thus, the predominant Greek philosophical schools—The Academy (originally Platonic), The Peripatetics (originally Aristotelian), Stoicism, and Epicureanism—offered different definitions of the good life; diverse recipes for attaining such a life; and competing accounts of why those recipes were successful. Throughout its history, philosophy has chronicled vastly different answers to the question of “How should I live my life?” By studying carefully their definitions, recipes, and accounts of what constitutes the good human life we can understand better who we are and who we might be. In this work, I consider the answers provided by over thirty philosophers to various aspects of this persistent question. In so doing, twenty lessons for living a worthy life emerge. In Chapter One, I examine the fundamental aspects of building character by explaining and critically assessing the work of Nietzsche, Sartre, Plato, Dante, Stoicism, Cicero, and Heidegger. Nietzsche argues that meaning and value arise from the process of life which is grounded in ongoing striving. In his view, our most basic general desire is to continue to have specific desires that we struggle to fulfill as we confront obstacles and endure suffering. The fulfillment of specific desires is at once satisfying and frustrating: we are satisfied in that we attained our goal but frustrated because we temporarily lack a specific desire to animate our sense of purpose. Thus, we continue the struggle and in so doing transform who we are. Nietzsche sets us on the correct path for character-building, but his understanding is contaminated by aristocratic excesses that must be adjusted or discarded. Sartre insists that we are condemned to be free, and explains what that provocative statement means. I conclude that a more precise rendering of Sartre’s idea is that we are condemned to act as if we are free and I address the implications of holding that conviction. Plato and Dante advance the intuitively unsettling notion that virtue is its own reward and vice is its own punishment. Most of us are convinced this

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proposition is false, even if we wish that it was true. I argue that there is an important sense in which Plato and Dante are correct and connect their conclusions to structuring a worthy self. The Stoics theorized that human well-being flows from concerning oneself only with those matters fully under one’s control: our own judgments, attitudes, and beliefs. I explain the respects in which the Stoics were correct and the ways in which they overstated their case. The Romans, particularly Cicero, laid much of the groundwork for what became an influential notion of honor and deserved self-pride for centuries. Although invocations of “honor” strike many contemporary listeners as anachronistic and dangerous, I argue that honor and justified self-pride can play a crucial transformative role in modern society. Heidegger stressed the important of leading an authentic human life. I analyze what he meant and argue that leading a genuine life is necessary but not sufficient for crafting worthy character. In Chapter Two, I address the more important human relationships and the issue of what we owe other people by examining the work of Aristotle, Plato, and Peter Singer. Aristotle’s seminal work in the area of friendship provides my point of departure in sketching the nature of salutary human relations. Plato’s evolving understanding of love in two of his better known dialogues challenges us to explore our own erotic connections more deeply. Is love at bottom irrational and obsessive, and centered on the concrete particularities of another person? Or is it fundamentally an earthly attempt to reach for what is divine? Or is it something else? These questions are asked and answered. Finally, Peter Singer challenges our conventional understanding of what we owe others and argues that our duties to strangers in need are more extensive than we now suppose. In a secular rendering of the biblical parable of the Good Samaritan, Singer, in effect, asks, “Who is my neighbor?” and “What is my neighbor’s due?” I assess Singer’s prescriptions in the light of the debate between moral partialists and moral impartialists. This chapter extends the project of building character from individual to communal concerns. In Chapter Three, I deepen the communal aspect of character-building. Personal identity is not crafted in isolation. As members of commonwealths, we must examine what we should expect from our political leaders, what they should expect from citizens, and what citizens should expect from each other. The connection between worthy selves and the political contexts in which they are formed remains crucial. Machiavelli understood most acutely that given the nature of the world and the often zero-sum context of international politics, chief political officers must sometimes dirty their hands by using evil well. I explore the nature of the

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problem, the inner conflict of chief political officers, and the role of citizens in facilitating appropriate political relations. Gramsci offers a leftist alternative to classical Marxism. His notions of ideological hegemony, historical bloc, counter-hegemony, and war of position provide insights into the possibilities for and prerequisites of radical social transformation. I critically examine Gramsci’s philosophy and apply it to the involvement of coalition forces in Iraq. Roberto Unger invites us to go beyond capitalist and communist economics. His “super-liberalism” emerges from the internal development of existing legal, political, and economic policies and doctrines. Unger connects his political program to what he takes to be the one unconditional fact about human nature: its plasticity and yearning to transcend the cultural contexts that structure established forms of personal relations, intellectual inquiry, and social arrangements. I analyze Unger’s program in an effort to cull what is most useful for the project of building character. This chapter manifests the importance of political and social contexts for the development and selfrealization of human beings. In Chapter Four, I confront the enormous issue of how, if at all, human beings can live a meaningful life. Camus posits cosmic meaninglessness as his starting point: the cosmos does not embody any inherent value, purpose, or meaning. He uses the ancient Myth of Sisyphus to illustrate the ultimate futility of a single human life and human life taken collectively. Yet he offers hope that we can transform our destinies through our emotions and attitudes. We can create fragile human meaning in the face of cosmic meaninglessness. I explore the power of Camus’ vision and raise several concerns. Karl Marx renounces all thick theories of human nature and, instead, argues that we are most fulfilled when engaging in unalienated labor. He insists that creative expenditure of our energies and enthusiasms is the core of human satisfaction. Regardless of his association of unalienated labor with communist economics and politics, I argue that Marx identifies a paramount aspect of human fulfillment. Schopenhauer disputes the conventional notion that human life is valuable. He argues that human beings are doomed to a dreary journey on a pendulum of frustration because of the nature of our striving and the lack of intrinsically valuable objects. Because of the impossibility of any final fulfillment, human beings endure a life that is reduced to “a business that does not cover its expenses.” I revert to Nietzsche in arguing that Schopenhauer, although uncovering a kernel of truth, is radically mistaken about the possibilities of human life and the nature of desire. Robert Nozick introduces an experience machine that is able to confer upon its users any positive experience or set of sensations that they can imagine.

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Nozick argues that the vast majority of us would refuse to enter the machine and he explains why. His spadework is my point of departure in explaining why hedonism fails and in examining how a meaningful human life can be captured by the metaphors of a telescope and a pogo stick. Finally, I explain why happiness is overrated and why generating a robustly meaningful, valuable life is more important. This chapter links the project of crafting a worthy self to larger questions of meaning, purpose, and value. In Chapter Five, I confront human mortality and discuss how we might die gracefully. I recall how forty years ago, James Rachels introduced me to the distinction between biographical and biological lives. I add the notion of autobiographical lives and explain how our biographical lives typically extend beyond our biological lives. This opens the possibility that our narratives persist in a sense beyond our deaths. I then examine Joel Feinberg’s important work on posthumous harm. Feinberg argues that we must recognize a distinction between being harmed and being hurt. He denies the power of the experience requirement—the principle that insists that we must endure negative or positive sensations in order to be harmed or benefited, respectively, by an event. I use Feinberg’s work to engage a wider inquiry into the possibility of posthumous wrongs and harms. In so doing, I examine the existence requirement—the principle that holds that the harm of evil and the benefit of good require an identifiable, living subject. I advance two theories that conclude that posthumous wrongs (or rights) and posthumous harms (or benefits) are possible. The final section of the book struggles with Pascal’s gloomy depiction of human life: we are condemned to death, gathered in chains, and watch warily as others depart the earth as we await our turn. As an alternative, I portray mortality as a context for living and try to demonstrate that the way we die often casts glory or infamy on the manner we lived. Death may entail our destruction but it need not be our defeat. This chapter ties the lessons of the previous chapters into a coherent program of how to cope with finitude. In my judgment, after reading this work, even Stanley Fish would admit that philosophical inquiry matters for everyday living. Even those who will disagree with the substantive conclusions I reach and the program for robust living I urge will recognize that the philosophers included in this work have served humanity by publicly pondering the enduring questions that define the human condition.

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

As is the common practice, when I have cited from the writings of some prominent authors the references in all cases have been given immediately in the text and not in the notes. I used multiple versions of the texts in some cases. Unless otherwise indicated, all references are to sections or chapters, not page numbers. I have used the following abbreviations: For Nietzsche: BGE EH GM GS TI UM WP Z

Beyond Good and Evil (1886) Ecce Homo (1908) On the Genealogy of Morals (1887) The Gay Science (1882) Twilight of the Idols (1889) Untimely Meditations (1873-1876) The Will to Power (unpublished notebooks, 1883-1888) Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-1885)

BGE 13= GM II, 12= GS 125= WP 1067=

Beyond Good and Evil, section 13. On the Genealogy of Morals, Book 2, section 12. The Gay Science, Section 125. The Will to Power, section 1067.

EH,

“Why I Am So Clever,” 9: Ecce Homo, “Why I Am So Clever,” section 9. “Schopenhauer as Educator,” 8: Untimely Meditations, “Schopenhauer as Educator,” section 8. “Maxims and Arrows,” 12: Twilight of the Idols, “Maxims and Arrows,” number 12. “Zarathustra’s Prologue,” 5: Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Book 1, “Zarathustra’s Prologue,” section 5.

UM, TI, Z I,

For Epictetus: EN EN 12=

Encheiridion (Manual for Living) Encheiridion, sec. 12.

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List of Abbreviations

For Cicero: O O 1.25=

De Officiis De Officiis, book 1, section 25.

For Plato: PH R S S 178a-180e=

Phaedrus Republic Symposium Symposium 178a-180e (Stephanus numbering)

For Aristotle: NE NE

Nicomachean Ethics 1103a14-1104b13= Nicomachean Ethics 1103a141104b13 (Bekker numbering)

For Machiavelli: AW The Art of War D The Discourses FH Florentine Histories Ltr. Machiavelli’s letters P The Prince AW 2 45= The Art of War, Book 2, page 45 (Wood D I 55 = The Discourses, Book I, chapter 55 FH I 3 = Florentine Histories, Book I, section 3 Ltr. 247: 1/31/15= Letter 247: January 31, 1515 (Atkinson and Sices edition) P 18= The Prince, chapter 18

edition)

CHAPTER ONE BUILDING CHARACTER

Is it possible that the fundamental human drive is the pursuit of power in some sense? Can human beings create meaning in an otherwise aimless world? If we are creatures lacking a final destiny can we nevertheless live meaningfully and die gracefully? To begin to answer such vexing, enduring questions and to initiate an inquiry into how to build character in a world not of our making, we should first consult Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) for his advice on how to conceptualize and experience the process of human life.

1. Luxuriate in the Process of Life: Friedrich Nietzsche “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” ʊ Albert Einstein

Nietzsche advances a host of broad themes that underwrite his philosophical conclusions:1

Understand that inner conflict is inescapable Human beings embody multiple drives, deep ambiguity and ambivalence, and internally mirror the ongoing flux of the cosmos. Refusing to accept what he took to be the false consolations of religion, Nietzsche was convinced that our world lacks inherent meaning and value. Accordingly, our world is bereft of an intrinsic purpose which human beings might discover. We can call this a belief in “cosmic meaninglessness.” If Nietzsche is correct, the only meaning and value possible must be humanly constructed and thus fragile.

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Love life For Nietzsche, the lack of inherent cosmic meaning and purpose challenges us to respond positively: to accept our lives in their entireties and to fashion them in such a way that we luxuriate in our time on earth without the distractions of revenge and ressentiment (hostility directed at the perceived cause of a person’s frustration or feelings of inadequacy) Nietzsche captures this response in his call for amor fati (love of fate): I do not want in the least that anything should become different than it is; I myself do not want to become different . . . My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary—but love it (EH, “Why I Am So Clever,” 9, 10).

Amor fati, then, captures Nietzsche highest value: maximally affirming life with full understanding of its tragic dimensions. Suffering and adversity, instead of being avoided, should be crafted for practical advantage. Abundantly healthy spirits respect the order of human rank based on merit, cherish opportunities for self-transformation through struggle and rich exertion, seek personal challenges from motives of joy and love of life, and scorn cowardly hopes for salvation in an afterlife. Nietzsche’s message is direct: This life is my only life and if I confront it with aesthetic creativity and a full heart it will be quite enough.

Exercise the will to power The will to power connotes a process, which has growth, expansion, and accumulation at its core. The will to power does not seek final serenity or a fixed state of affairs. Nietzsche argues that the will to power is not fulfilled unless it confronts struggle, resistance, and opposition. Pursuing power, in the sense of increasing influence and strength, requires intentionally and actually finding obstacles to overcome. Indeed, the will to power is a will to the precise activity of struggling with and overcoming obstacles. Because suffering and pain attend the experience of such struggle, a robust will to power must desire suffering in that sense (BGE 225, 228). The resulting paradox is that the fulfillment of the will to power— the overcoming of resistance—results in dissatisfaction as the struggle has (temporarily) concluded. The will to power requires obstacles to the satisfaction of its specific first-order desires because beyond specific desires, the will to power has a more fundamental desire to struggle with and over-

Building Character

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come obstacles. In sum, the will to power deeply desires resistance to the satisfaction of its own specific first-order desires. For example, a person’s will to power is the drive to have ongoing desires. These ongoing desires are the specific first-order desires that constitute our goals. Suppose Smith desires to be a great baseball player. He invests considerable time, effort, and possibly expense in striving to fulfill that purpose. Along the way, he will confront obstacles, endure disappointments, and suffer in a variety of ways. Whether he attains his goal of becoming a great baseball player or not, if Smith approaches his journey with the proper attitude he will have strengthened his will to power (his desire to continuing desiring) and he will develop and pursue new goals. For Nietzsche, this is the process of life that builds character. Should Smith, if he should fail in his efforts to become a great baseball player, withdraw and wallow in disappointment he would be revealing and reinforcing the feebleness of his will to power. At times, Nietzsche suggests that the will to power is not only the fundamental but the only drive of life. Although he expresses this view in several of his writings, he most forcefully captures it in his Nachlass: “This world is the will to power—and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power—and nothing besides! (WP 1067; See also, Z I, “On the Thousand and One Goals”; Z II, “On Self-Overcoming”; Z II, “On Redemption”; BGE 13, 36, 259; GS 349; GM II, 12). As such, one might be tempted to conclude that for Nietzsche human beings can strive only for power; that power is the sole motivating force in the world; and power is thus the only goal that can and is desired. On this reading, Nietzsche would open himself to the charge that he mistakenly reduces the complexity of human psychology and life to only one overly broad concept and that concept itself thereby lacks determinate meaning. Is it not plausible to believe that human beings are sometimes motivated by impulses other than the desire to grow and extend their influence? Must other possible motivations such as the pursuit of pleasure or happiness or intimacy be reducible always to an extension of power? Although Nietzsche’s notion of the will to power has been interpreted in many different ways, the most convincing view, in my judgment, is that the will to power is not the only drive or motivating force animating human life. Instead, the will to power is (a) a second-order drive to have and fulfill first-order desires and (b) to confront and overcome resistance in fulfilling first-order desires. When resistance is overcome and a first-order desire is fulfilled, the will to power is initially satisfied but soon frustrated because it lacks a first-order desire and resistance to its fulfillment. Thus, the will to power requires ongoing first-order desires and resistance to

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Chapter One

their fulfillment. These first-order desires—for example, to compete in sports, master a musical instrument, drink in order to quench thirst, eat in order to relieve hunger, and the like—do not arise from the will to power. That is, the will to power itself does not determine which particular firstorder desires we will pursue. Drives and impulses other than the will to power must provide the first-order desires that animate the will to power’s activity. Thus, the will to power cannot be the only drive or impulse embodied by human beings. The desire for power alone cannot provide the necessary specific first-order desires. The robustness of various wills to power can be evaluated based on the significance of the obstacles they are willing to confront and overcome, and the suffering they are willing to endure in the process. First-order desires can also be evaluated on a host of dimensions including the role they play in maximally affirming life, the opportunities to exhibit creativity they offer, the resistance they may encounter, and the ways they help build character. Accordingly, the will to power cannot embrace final serenity or permanent fulfillment. The satisfaction of one specific desire brings both fulfillment, a feeling of increased strength and influence, and dissatisfaction, as resistance has been overcome and is no longer present. Only endless striving and continual conquests fuel a robust will to power. Nietzsche, then, embraces the criterion of power: exertion, struggle and suffering are at the core of overcoming obstacles, and human beings experience and truly feel their power only by avidly engaging in this process.

Avoid the indolent life Nietzsche reserves special contempt for that most despicable human type he calls the “last man.” The last man shrivels before the thought that the cosmos lacks inherent value and meaning. In their search for security, contentment, and minimal exertion last men lead shallow lives of timid conformity and superficial happiness. They take solace in a narrow egalitarianism that severs them from the highest human possibilities: intense love, grand creation, deep longing, passionate exertion, and adventure in pursuit of excellence. ‘We have invented happiness,’ say the last men, and they blink. They have left the regions where it was hard to live, for one needs warmth. One still loves one’s neighbor and rubs against him, for one needs warmth. Becoming sick and harboring suspicion are sinful to them: one proceeds carefully. A fool, whoever still stumbles over stones or human beings! A little poison now and then: that makes for agreeable dreams. And much poison in the

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end, for an agreeable death. One still works, for work is a form of entertainment. But one is careful lest the entertainment be too harrowing. One no longer becomes poor or rich: both require too much exertion. Who still wants to rule? Who obey? Both require too much exertion . . . everybody wants the same, everybody is the same . . . ‘We have invented happiness,’ say the last men, and they blink (Z I, “Zarathustra’s Prologue,” 5).

The highest ambitions of last men are comfort and security. They are the extreme case of the herd mentality: habit, custom, indolence, selfpreservation, and muted will to power prevail. Last men embody none of the inner tensions and conflicts that spur transformative action: they take no risks, lack convictions, avoid experimentation, and seek only bland survival. They invent “happiness” as the brutish accumulation of pleasure and avoidance of suffering. They “blink” to hide themselves from reality. They ingest “poison” now and then in the form of religious indoctrination focused on a supposedly blissful afterlife. Last men lack the vigor and exalted will to power that can view this world as it is, yet maximally affirm it. Like cockroaches after a nuclear explosion, last men live the longest. Nietzsche understands that higher human types are more fragile, more likely to squander their abundant passions in acts of self-overcoming than last men who are concerned narrowly with species survival. Expanding one’s influence and discharging one’s strength often jeopardize selfpreservation. For Nietzsche, the quality, intensity, and authenticity of a life are higher values than its duration. But no project, however successful, can complete the self once and forever. Our lives, instructs Nietzsche, are processes that end only with death or from that moment when we lose the basic human capabilities required for self-making. Until then, a person should view herself as an elegant artist whose greatest creation is the character she continues to refine.

Reinvent yourself To prepare to even approximate a higher human type, we must pass through “three metamorphoses” of discipline, defiance, and creation. The spirit, like a camel, flees into the desert to bear enormous burdens (the process of social construction); the spirit, like a lion, must transform itself into a master, a conqueror who releases its own freedom by destroying traditional prohibitions (the process of deconstruction of and liberation from the past); but the lion cannot create new values, so the spirit must transform itself into a child, whose playful innocence, ability to forget, and capability for creative games signals the spirit’s willing its own will (the

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processes of re-imagination and re-creation) (Z I, “On the Three Metamorphoses”). This describes the full process of Nietzschean becoming— recurrent deconstruction, re-imagination, and re-creation—the virtues of the grand striver.

Embrace an ideal Nietzsche offers a sketch of the process that higher human types might undergo and a host of general attributes they might embody: (a) Rejoice in Contingency and Ambiguity: we should nurture the ability to marginalize but not eliminate negative and destructive impulses within ourselves, and to transfigure them into joyous affirmation of all aspects of life; understand and celebrate the radical contingency, finitude, and fragility of ourselves, our institutions and the cosmos itself; and regard life itself as fully and merely natural, as embodying no higher meaning or value. (b) Nurture a Pure Spirit and Appreciation of Process: we should harbor little or no resentment toward others or toward the human condition; confront the world in immediacy and with a sense of vital connection; refuse to avert our gaze from a tragic world-view and, instead, find value not in eventual happiness, as conceived by academic philosophers, but in the activities and processes themselves. (c) Pursue Growth and Overcome Obstacles: we should refuse to supplicate oneself before great people of the past but, instead, accept their implicit challenge to go beyond them; give style to our character by transforming our conflicting internal passions into a disciplined yet dynamic unity; facilitate high culture by sustaining a favorable environment for the rise of great individuals; strive for excellence through self-overcoming that honors the recurrent flux of the cosmos by refusing to accept a “finished” self as constitutive of personal identity; and recognize that release from the tasks at hand are found only in death. Given the human condition, high energy is more important than a final, fixed goal. The mantra of “challenge, struggle, overcoming, and growth,” animating and transfiguring perpetual internal conflict, replaces prayers for redemption to supernatural powers. Part of our life struggle is to confront and overcome the last man within each of us, to hold our internal “dwarf” at bay.

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If possible, aspire to perfection Under philosophical doctrines categorized as “perfectionism” nurturing and refining the properties constitutive of human nature define the good life. Human beings should strive to maximize their higher potentials. But perfectionism need not and should not presuppose that attaining perfection in this regard is possible. Thus, Nietzsche is not a perfectionist in the sense that he believes that human nature is perfectible or that the majority of human beings will maximize their higher potentials or that there is one specific final goal to which all human beings should aspire or even that human beings can attain a final goal or constitute a finished product; but he is a perfectionist in a more modest sense. Nietzsche’s perfectionism is individualistic and aristocratic. As such, he does not intend that his normative message be embraced by everyone. In fact, he speaks only to the few who have the potential to understand fully the tragic nature of life yet affirm life in all its dimensions. The crucial ingredients that define higher human beings, for Nietzsche, are the capability of enduring great suffering and turning it to practical advantage; the impulse to exert high energy and enthusiasm into projects requiring uncommon creativity; and full participation in the ongoing process of personal deconstruction-reimagination-re-creation. For the greatest among us, our paramount artistic project is crafting a grand self. Nietzsche understands that greatness necessarily involves suffering and the overcoming of grave obstacles (BGE 225, 228). He evaluates peoples, individuals, and cultures by their ability to transform suffering and tragedy to spiritual advantage. We cannot eliminate suffering, but we can use it creatively. Suffering and resistance can stimulate and nourish a robust will to power. By changing our attitude toward suffering from pity to affirmation, we open ourselves to greatness. For Nietzsche, joy and strength trump the “happiness” of the herd, which is too often grounded in the values of last men.

Concerns Although often inspiring, Nietzsche’s prescriptions must be modified because they are excessively aristocratic. For example, according to Nietzsche, my goal, as a person who cannot plausibly argue that he is a higher human type from a Nietzschean perspective (at best, I am only a member of the “scholarly oxen” class) should be expending my time, effort, and resources to advance the interests and perfectionist quest of the greatest exemplars in my society: “Mankind must work continually to produce

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individual great human beings—this and nothing else is its task . . . How can your life, the individual life, retain the highest value? . . . only by your living for the good of the rarest and most valuable specimens” (UM, “Schopenhauer as Educator, 6; see also, BGE 126, 199, 265, GS 23) and “The essential characteristic of a good and healthy aristocracy . . . [is] that it accepts with a good conscience the sacrifice of untold human beings who, for its sake, must be reduced and lowered to incomplete human beings, to slaves, to instruments” (BGE 258). In sum, under the standard interpretation of his writings, Nietzsche’s perfectionism instructs the vast majority of us to devote ourselves only to nurturing the excellences of the great exemplars in our society and empowers the great exemplars to embrace our sacrifices and use our services with a good conscience. While Nietzsche recognizes that insofar as all human beings embody the will to power, and power is the standard of excellence, all human beings have some value.2 But he grades the quantity and quality of value by aristocratic criteria that conclude that the masses have value (beyond minimum species worth) only insofar as they serve a few “great” people who in turn care about the masses only to the extent that the masses can serve them. Even if we softened Nietzsche’s view by adding intermediate principles that recognize a hierarchy of graded degrees of excellence, the problem persists. The intermediate principles would give more reason to care for the “non-great” to the degree, however slight, to which they approach greatness, but would still not satisfy basic egalitarian inclinations. Nietzsche seemingly celebrates accomplishments and creative greatness by severing them from the lives that sustain them. Nietzsche ignores concrete human beings and wrongly amplifies artistic, philosophical, musical, scientific, and military creation in the abstract. He apparently would willingly sacrifice human lives for great works. Nietzsche’s seemingly fatuous aristocratism and reptilian indifference to the lives of the masses are the low point of his work. All human beings, mediocre or potentially great, need a deep sense of purpose in their lives. Nietzsche would have us believe that such purpose should center on becoming great or serving those who can become great, where “greatness” translates to the creation of cultural artifacts and a vague type of selfmastery. Nietzsche may well be charged with focusing excessively on the self to the exclusion of real intimacy and community. We must find meaning, one would suppose, outside the self and beyond cultural creations. We need communal involvements in causes greater than nurturing cultural superstars. Would Nietzsche have us believe that Mother Teresa’s life—at least the part spent ministering to the poor and diseased—was in vain?

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Was she only the queen of the herd? Did she merely waste time resuscitating the replaceable? Nietzsche too easily identifies the masses with fungibility, as if all nongreat human beings are akin to sparrows whose lives are indistinguishable. But, contrary to Nietzsche, greatness is not found only in art, philosophy, music, and science. Greatness is often embodied by those whose lives are among the simplest and who lack public renown. Such greatness is not focused on Nietzschean creativity or the trendy donning and discarding of personal masks. Instead, it is centered on love, caring, making the world a better place by deeply influencing those around you in uniquely positive ways, speaking to our higher instincts rather than obsessing about power and domination. Our choices are not simply herd conformity or Nietzschean greatness. Accordingly, greatness comes in more forms than Nietzsche suggests. As reflective people grow, they come to realize that there are heroes all around them. Men and women of strength, honor, and courage who are capable of stunning self-sacrifice because they perceive themselves as part of a wider subjectivity, perhaps as a link in a generational chain that often stretches from an old country to the new. They are the giants upon whose shoulders many of us stood. Heroes do not always get their names in the newspapers; they do not always create great art, music, philosophy, or science. While Nietzsche rants and raves about the herd, and self-servingly positions himself above it, many of us will retain our faith in the immediacy of flesh-and-blood and in redeeming intimacy. While we should not easily disparage the life of the interior, it is woefully insufficient for engaging the world. Private fulfillment is less purposeful than public involvement that requires passionate identification with particular communities. Such activity, horror of horrors, means mingling with the herd. Human beings have a need for belonging and much fear, insecurity, selfishness, and anxiety arise from the frustration of that need. This need does not flow from a herd instinct, at least not in a pejorative sense, but is a prerequisite for a highly textured and meaningful life. The lack of a robust sense of belonging undermines the development of the self. Suppose that a person, Rizzo, through uncommon effort, will, and determination actualizes most of her higher human capabilities. The final product is someone who is only average or perhaps a smidgen above average when judged by Nietzschean vectors of creativity, zest for adventure, high artistic production, and the like. Rizzo has (nearly) maximized her positive potentials given her innate talents, initial starting position, and early socialization. For the sake of comparison, let’s stipulate that she has

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attained, say, 90% of her higher human capabilities. She has become (nearly) all that she could possibly be. Her neighbor, Leonardo, exerts less effort, will, and determination; he fails to actualize many of his higher human capabilities. But Leonardo enjoyed distinct advantages over Rizzo in terms of innate talents, initial starting position, and early socialization. As a result, although he attains, say, only 67% of his capabilities, Leonardo, when judged by Nietzschean vectors is clearly well above average in terms of final product. Leonardo has become only about two-thirds of what he could possibly be, but this still places him ahead of Rizzo when judged in terms of creativity, zest for adventure, high artistic production, and the like. The question for Nietzsche is this: Who is the higher human type—the “average” person who became such by nearly maximizing her positive potentials or the “well above average” person who was blessed with much greater innate talents but developed only two-thirds of his positive potentials? The case for Rizzo is clear: she accomplished nearly everything she could possibly attain given her nature and environment; she became virtually all she could be; what more can we ask of a human being? The case for Leonardo lies in final product: he is simply more accomplished than Rizzo; perhaps Rizzo deserves a round of applause—in the same way that a donkey who gave its all in a thoroughbred race only to lose by threequarters of mile merits a cheer for attaining its personal best time—but Rizzo’s best simply pales before Leonardo’s superior development even if we can reasonably claim that Leonardo underachieved (that he failed to become what he might and should have become given his innate talents and initial starting position). The choice is between measuring greatness by (a) achieving one’s maximum positive potential (the Rizzo standard) or by (b) one’s overall positive development as such (the Leonardo standard). Nietzsche, it would seem, would be far more likely to embrace the Leonardo standard. In the instant case, he would surely conclude that neither Rizzo nor Leonardo is a higher human type—both fall short of Nietzsche’s highest aspirations. But when ordering the rank of human beings, Nietzsche seems to invoke the Leonardo standard. For Nietzsche, becoming all that one could possibly become is woefully insufficient for greatness in those cases where innate talents are ordinary. The higher human types are such by their exceptional attainments—as judged by Nietzschean vectors. Probably the greatest among us must have Leonardo’s talents and gifts combined with Rizzo’s drive and diligence, but surely to qualify as a higher human type invoking the Rizzo standard is insufficient in Nietzsche’s view.

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Perhaps by jettisoning Nietzsche’s commitment to the Leonardo standard we can salvage his general trajectory about the quest for human perfection. Much of what Nietzsche says resonates with modern readers. For example, Nietzsche insists that we understand fully the tragic dimensions of life and accept the challenges of cosmic meaninglessness. He unmasks the conceits and disguises of dominant society, and forces us to confront the “truth.” He casts suspicion where smug assurance had reigned, and reminds us that striving toward worthwhile goals is accompanied by meaningful and valuable hardship. Nietzsche counsels love, laughter, and joy where resentment, mendacity, and envy had prevailed. He seeks disciples among the strong, hard, courageous, and creative, and then he implores them to go beyond his teaching. He insists that the cosmos is inherent meaningless, but emphasizes that the creation and imposition of value and meaning on our world is part of the human quest. Most important, Nietzsche underscores that a human life is an ongoing process that resists final fulfillment. Having abandoned Nietzsche’s aristocratic convictions and having replaced the Leonardo standard of measuring human perfection with the Rizzo standard, we are prepared to embark on our Nietzschean journey. In order to do so, we must now examine Jean-Paul Sartre’s (1905-1980) understanding of human freedom.

2. Relish Freedom: Jean-Paul Sartre “Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.” ʊ Sigmund Freud

To what extent, if any, are human beings free and thereby responsible for their choices and actions? Are ultimate justifications that underwrite those choices and actions available to us? What implications for how we should live follow from our freedom? How is our approach to freedom critical to the characters that we construct? For Sartre, we are living in good faith to the extent that we accept reality and assume our freedom. Human beings cannot choose not to choose.3 Freedom is the basis of our actions; we have the power to change. The anxiety often accompanying our deliberation about options arises from the lack of ultimate justifications for our decisions. Sartre ratifies Nietzsche: We live in a thoroughly conditional world and we are thoroughly contingent beings. The world could be otherwise. We could be otherwise. No pre-ordained master plan underwrites the universe or human choice. Lacking absolute grounds for our decisions, we must take recurrent

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leaps of faith. Faith is understood in this context as maintaining robust belief and conviction, and resolutely choosing and acting in the face of radical uncertainty. A salutary sense of freedom is empowering, but is also a mixed blessing. The absence of enduring foundations that might guide human choice makes us completely responsible for the people we are becoming. No legitimate excuses are available to soften our burden or ease our responsibility. For Sartre, human beings do not have a fixed nature. We are free, we choose, and we act on those choices. We are responsible for our actions and craft a self through them. Human beings are nothing else but the totality of their choices and actions, which make us who we are becoming. No necessary or inevitable grounds for our choices and actions are available to us. Thus, no ultimate justifications inform what we do or who we become. We are condemned to our freedom in that we cannot choose not to choose. Sartre famously considers a moral dilemma involving a French youth during World War II. The young man senses a deep duty to join the military and help defend his country against Nazi aggression. But his mother is ill and needs him to remain at home. What should he do? According to Sartre, no moral code can generate the right answer. The young man will experience regret and a sense of moral failure regardless of his decision. The French youth must decide one way or the other, with full knowledge that no ultimate justification is available. He is free to decide either way. He must take responsibility for the decision he makes. The process of exercising our freedom requires a radical conversion kindled by profound experiences of anguish. Anxiety reminds us that we are without excuses, but also without ultimate justifications; it reminds us that we must decide our future in confrontation with possibilities. We know we are free because of our experience of anxiety. Freedom is the burden we bear for our choices. Choosing and acting in the face of radical uncertainty requires a leap of faith. Our actions concern not only our interests but affect wider society, even the whole of humanity. Self-conscious choices are commitments that mold the people we are becoming. We must pursue interests, make commitments, and invest our energy in projects as our way of creating meaning through action. We attain no fixed, final goals, but if Sartre is correct, such a life is more genuine than not. To lead an intense, mostly genuine life, then, is a worthy human goal. We should all be so fortunate to attain that end.

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Defining who we are We must define ourselves through our choices and decisions, which reflect our exercises of freedom. Our goal must be won through the process of living artfully. We are responsible for the people we are becoming. Facile excuses, ego-saving rationalizations, and denials of responsibility are all too common, but unhelpful. Lacking belief in a world beyond, Sartre can offer no guarantees; although in a sense we will get what we deserve on earth as our choices and actions rebound to mold our characters. Sartre places no stock in exonerating individuals from responsibility based on their initial starting position in society, their early socialization, or the vicissitudes of outrageous fortune. Sartre discusses human beings in terms of facticity and transcendence. Our facticity consists of givens that form an unchangeable context within which we choose and act. For example, I cannot change my date of birth, my biological parents, where I was born and raised, my range of genetic inheritance, my early socialization and the like. Our transcendence centers on our freedom: our ability to reimagine our possibilities; to strategize changes; to develop and pursue projects and commitments; and to recreate who we are becoming. Within our context—our facticity—we are free. For better or for worse, Sartre highlights human freedom (transcendence) over genetic endowments and social circumstances (facticity). At the end of our lives, Sartre insists that we are responsible for the lives we have led and the people we became. Sartre’s overly simplified, uncompromising, but still profound slogan is “No Excuses.” On this view, the process of earthly living for human beings is self-definition through the exercise of freedom. We are completely responsible for those matters within our control. Sartre is convinced that the most important matters—those pertaining to the construction of our characters—are within our control. We are, then, in bad faith when we deny what we are or are not. Selfdeception and unsound epistemology are at the core of bad faith. The soldier who only and always obeys orders unreflectively is posing as pure facticity and denies his transcendence. The waiter who is playing at being a waiter is likewise denying his transcendence and posing as a fixed entity. The racist, who regards the members of a particular ethic, or religious group as stereotypical, fixed entities in order to deny his own shortcomings and to indict others for his failures, is in bad faith because he flees from responsibilities. If the French youth in Sartre’s illustration chose to remain at home and claimed he had no choice because his mother was ill, he would have acted in bad faith. Bad faith emerges from both the tendency to think of oneself as pure facticity—as we identity wholly with our

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unalterable past—and the tendency to wish oneself totally free from that past. We are all in bad faith at times. The antidote to bad faith is to understand our freedom within context; to acknowledge the lack of ultimate grounds for our choices; to choose and act decisively despite the lack of ultimate justifications; to make no excuses; and to assume full responsibility for our choices and actions. To evince these dispositions is to act in good faith. Some human beings avoid the anguish of choice by refusing to engage themselves. They flee from responsibility and take refuge in the dominant social ideas and practices. Habit and custom—fixed orientations to the past—assume privilege of place. Here Sartre joins thoughts with Dante, whose vestibule of Hell is reserved precisely for such cowards. As always, Sartre offers hope. Our lives consist of our choices and actions—our expressions of freedom. Our dreams, hopes, fantasies, and the like are at most incidental to the people we are becoming. We are all condemned to be free. Our lives are framed in an ongoing struggle between authenticity and bad faith. Although choosing from a context—our facticity and circumstances—we have the power to reimagine and remake our contexts. At least we retain such power while we are alive and enjoy typical human capabilities.

Are we truly free? As Sartre is fond of reminding us, experience is the greatest “proof” that human beings have freedom. We cannot deny our freedom once we experience the anguish of choice; profoundly sense we could have done otherwise than we did; and, at times, break entrenched habits and patterns by apparent acts of will. Although neuroscience may insist that my decisions and choices are conjured in my brain prior to my consciousness of them, my felt experiences persist. Even if science repeats that my mind is subject to the typical material pattern of causes and effects, even if all events are determined by prior chains of causes and effects, we cling to a thin reed: causation need not be compulsion. My choices are neither random nor coerced. Sartre cannot prove that human beings are free. He appeals to moods or emotions, such as anxiety, angst, and dread that supposedly accompany choice and reflect our felt responsibility in the face of radically contingent decision-making. However, this strategy is thoroughly indeterminate. Explanations other than our total freedom can account for our moods, emotions, and experiences, while plausible philosophical and psychological evidence abounds suggesting that we are much less free than commonly

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supposed. If freedom requires making choices and acting on the basis of reasons that are not causes, then rationally establishing freedom is gravely problematic. But our experiences refuse to be ignored and seemingly win the day. Assuming that we are free is a better and the only way to live. Those of us embodying a strong notion of freedom gain vivid feelings of autonomy and control over our lives that increase well-being. Setting goals, prioritizing values, and developing and pursuing a self-conception require a strong sense of freedom. Even more important: How could we live and act under the self-conscious view that we are unfree? How would we experience the world? Consider a trivial example: you are convinced by philosophical argument, psychological findings, and scientific evidence that the experience of freedom is merely a human illusion. In fact, you are certain that human choices and actions are fully determined, both caused and compelled by our genetic wiring and socialization. A master scientist with access to all available, relevant data about us could infallibly predict our choices and actions. You then go to a restaurant for lunch. The server hands you a menu and asks for your order. What do you do? How does your view that all human action is fully determined affect what you say to the server? You must still choose this or that meal. If you say nothing—which would presumably also be a fully determined choice—you receive no food. So you make a selection, just as you would if you were fully free. In the background, you may insist that had a mastermind armed with all relevant data about you been present she could have predicted your choice. But from within your personal perspective, your background position on the free will issue is utterly irrelevant to your selection from the options on the menu. You must act as if you were free. In this more precise sense, human beings are condemned to their freedom. (Accordingly, Stanley Fish has a limited point: in this context, one’s philosophical conviction will not affect the way he or she lives. But the better lesson to draw is that our philosophical convictions require refinement in such cases.) We are, probably, less free than Sartre sometimes imagined. Our contexts and socialization are probably thicker than Sartre admitted. But we are freer than we typically suppose when we grasp for excuses that might permit us to shun responsibility for our shortcomings.

Emotions For Sartre, even our emotional reactions are not merely events that happen to us or responses that are beyond our agency. For example, we

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may not be able to change the world in dramatic ways, but we can change the way we interpret the world. Sartre talks about the emotions as magical transformations of the world, as ways of changing our perceptions of the world without objectively altering the structure of or events in the world.4 Through anger we register our sense of justice. Events in the world often strike us as unjust. Our anger intends to restore moral equilibrium, not necessarily in the world but in our interpretation of it. Through love we render a gloriously positive judgment upon the beloved. We perceive her actual characteristics, ideal possibilities, and her unique way of embodying those qualities as worthy of our commitment and expanded identity. Our perceptions and interpretations may be inaccurate, but they nevertheless alter our vision of the world. Our well-being may well depend more on how we interpret and evaluate the world than on the objective condition of the world. On Sartre’s view, our emotions are not solely or mainly involuntary physiological responses. They are not merely temporary, external intrusions into our lives for which we are not responsible. Instead, our emotions are intentional, strategic ways of coping with challenging situations. We subconsciously choose our emotions for particular practical purposes. Thus, we cannot invoke our emotions as excuses to evade personal responsibility for our choices and actions. We cannot excuse our inappropriate behavior by appealing to the emotions as if they are demons beyond our control that clouded our judgment and produced aberrant actions. Our typical reactions portray us as the victims of emotions that are somehow responsible for our deeds. For Sartre, this is an exercise of bad faith. In his view, our emotions are chosen strategies of coping with a trying world. We are responsible for our emotions and the actions arising from our indulgence of them. Making excuses is a form of bad faith: we try to deflect responsibility and deny our own freedom. In Sartrean terms, we exaggerate our facticity, flee from our transcendence, and thereby diminish ourselves. While Sartre may exaggerate the control we have over our emotions and overplay our freedom of choice, he offers a refreshing remedy to an ailing society such as ours that has degenerated into a culture of excusemakers. Moreover, if we are antecedently constructed to experience and thus believe that we are free, what rational evidence could change our manner of living other than in a purely academic way? Even if we are convinced by the evidence against human free will, we must heed Sartre’s slogan, “We are condemned to be free,” and adjust it: “We are condemned to live as if we are free.” Sartre insists that we are radically free and fully responsible. His rallying cry of “No Excuses” amplifies that theme. As a

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matter of theory, Sartre may well be incorrect, but as a function of practice—how we must live our lives—his program, modestly adjusted, resonates deeply. We are biologically constructed to live as if we are free. No other practical alternative is available. Once we accept that human life is a process that is risky but exhilarating and understand that we are condemned to act as if we are free, we must confront good and evil. Plato (428-347 BC) and Dante (1265-1321) can help us fathom why it is plausible to conclude that virtue is its own reward and vice is its own punishment.

3. Appreciate that Virtue is its own Reward: Plato and Dante “To be able under all circumstances to practice five things constitutes perfect virtue; these five things are gravity, generosity of soul, sincerity, earnestness and kindness.” ʊ Confucius

As we observe the workings of the world, we are sometimes struck by their injustice and irrationality. Too often, bad things seemingly befall righteous people, while good things happen to bad people. The correlation between virtue and reward, and between vice and punishment appears to be haphazard. Yet we yearn for a world that is rational and just. Is there a sense in which virtue can be reasonably understood as being its own reward and vice its own punishment? Can this principle be grounded in reality and explained in a way that is not merely a projection of our wishes? How would embracing such a principle influence our choices and actions, and transform how we craft our interior life? Through the character Socrates in his dialogues, Plato ponders the question of who is better off—the perfectly unjust person, who commits numerous unjust acts but who retains a reputation for being virtuous; or the perfectly just person, who embodies high moral rectitude but through mistake is saddled with an unsavory reputation (R 359a-367e, 588b-592b). Socrates concludes that reality supersedes mere appearance: the perfectly just person is better off because the objective condition of his or her soul (or mind or psyche) is harmonious, balanced, and healthy. Just as human beings can be mistaken about their physical health—we can think we are healthy when we are in fact ill and vice versa—they can be mistaken about their internal condition. We can think we benefit materially and nonmaterially from an undeserved glorious reputation, but in fact our internal condition reflects precisely the quality of the choices and actions. Because our

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internal condition, like our physical healthy, is an objective matter, the erroneous perceptions of others are irrelevant to our well-being. Accordingly, the perfectly unjust person is not well off because his or her soul is objectively unhealthy. The perfectly unjust person embodies a soul that lacks harmony, balance, and happiness. Upon death, the soul of the perfectly unjust person will be punished in that he or she will be denied eternal residence in the World of the Forms and, instead, will endure transmigration into another body to continue the quest for internal purification. Certainly we may object to Plato’s metaphysics of a higher reality consisting of intangible universals that are the absolute exemplars of truth, beauty, and goodness. His suppositions about transmigration, the human search for internal purification, and personal immortality are also highly problematic. Plato’s strict dualism, wherein the soul is the center of personal identity, the body is its tomb or prison, and only after its liberation from the body can the soul regain its full capabilities, is also unlikely to convince contemporary readers. Plato was greatly influenced by his predecessor Pythagoras (570-495 BC), who was in turn inspired by eastern thought. But apart from his dubious metaphysical underpinnings, Plato offers a compelling principle: virtue is its own reward and vice is its own punishment. This principle anticipates the message of existential philosophers such as Sartre: we make ourselves who we are becoming through our choices and actions; who we are becoming is an objective matter that is independent of mistaken perceptions and false epistemology.

Retribution in hell Dante Alighieri vividly depicts how people become their sins, how their souls solidify into fixed entities that mirror the fruits of their deeds among their kind in hell. Dante emphasizes the law of contrapasso (divine retribution): the punishment inflicted upon sinners must reflect the nature of their transgressions; the relationship between the particular suffering in the afterlife and the specific sin must be clear. In that sense, penitents bring about their own destiny. They receive what they willed through their choices and actions.5 Plato and Dante share the conviction that wrongdoing brings its own punishment: even if evil-doing is not recognized as such by other people and even if it results in no apparent external adverse consequences to the performing agent, it nevertheless alters the inner topography of the perpetrator unwholesomely. Plato and Dante insist that an unworthy soul will

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eventually be exposed for what it is and suffer thereby in the afterlife. But even those who have no allegiance to personal immortality and an afterlife can entertain their teachings. Imagine the perfectly unjust person. He performs numerous wrongful acts: he is often tyrannical; he is sometimes vicious and cruel; and he ignores the common good while indulging his selfish (not merely selfinterested) ambition. Yet through a combination of skill and luck, the masses perceive him as a moral exemplar worthy of enduring glory. One might argue that history will render the final verdict. Even if contemporaries are deceived by appearances and confer undeserved glory upon the perfectly unjust person, time is the ultimate editor and arbiter. With the additional information and detached perspective produced by the passage of time, the unjust person will eventually be exposed. History will uncover the truth, unmask his motives and relegate the perfectly unjust person to his deserved ranking in the lowest depths of the infamous. Because the perfectly unjust person sought enduring glory which is now denied him he ultimately reaps what he had sown even if no afterlife awaits him. Justice triumphs in the end as the unjust person’s biographical life registers the truth, now and forever. Only if this hypothetical scenario was realized and the perfectly unjust person embodied the requisite antecedent motivations—of earning enduring historical glory—could the argument succeed. But we enjoy no guarantees that historical perspective will correct the distorted views of contemporaries. In fact, the possibility remains that history might enhance the glowing reputation of the perfectly unjust person. Lacking infallibility, the consensus of history might even conclude that contemporary judgment underrated the greatness of this paragon of deception. We are left with a perfectly unjust person who is convinced no afterlife awaits human beings. Why should he worry about the condition of his soul (or, if one prefers, the state of his character) other than in terms of prudential considerations—how others will conceive of and respond to him now? A follower of Plato or Dante might proceed along these lines: A person who did not care about the condition of his soul does not understand the good. He cannot risk his soul in grand adventures because he has probably already lost it. By acting tyrannically and by transgressing against the common good, he fails his duties. He is unworthy of enduring glory and has earned only lasting infamy. If he succeeds in securing enduring glory because of extraordinary good luck or the obtuseness of contemporary judgment, he wallows in the world of appearances. A right-thinking human being aspires to be worthy of enduring glory, not merely to seem worthy of it. If the perfectly unjust person is indifferent to the distinction, that

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only adds to his infamy. Through his misdeeds, the perfectly unjust person will have collaborated in crafting an unworthy self. His depraved internal condition will manifest itself often in his choices and deeds. He will unwittingly expose the person he has become or, perhaps, always was. Plato and Dante agree: the effects of evil-doing on the character of perpetrators are direct, immediate, certain retributions for their wrongful acts. Regardless of the reactions and evaluations of other people and how perpetrators fare materially in the world, their internal condition unmistakably is altered by their deeds—and that is their most fundamental punishment. Such a response, however, may be unconvincing to those who insist that suffering negative sensations is necessary for punishment or that our interests are frustrated only by setbacks we experience.6 Although it is likely that the perfectly unjust person will expose the person he has become or always was we have no guarantees. At bottom, the best response we can lodge in defense of Plato and Dante may be that all human beings should worry about corrupting their characters because our lives focus mainly on the art of crafting a worthy self. To scoff at that project is to deny a major part of our humanity. For Dante, developing sound character involves spiritual purification in confrontation with temptation, suffering, and human fallibility. No light matter is at stake: our flourishing on earth and our fate in the afterlife depend on the outcome of this struggle. For secular existentialists such as Sartre, forging a worthy character involves confronting human weakness, the inclination to make excuses, and the comfort of inauthentic living. Again, no light matter is at stake: our flourishing on earth depends on our success in living a mostly authentic life that avoids major self-deceptions. We become what we choose and do. In any event, the parallel between Dante and a thinker such as Nietzsche is their joint concern for the human art of crafting a worthy self in a context where everything is at stake and nothing is guaranteed. Embedded in the vortex of everyday tasks and activities, human beings too often unconsciously relinquish the paramount project of their lives. Typically, we expend too little of our conscious effort and reflect too infrequently on crafting our characters. Plato and Dante anticipate existentialism when they demand that we explicitly and vigorously attend to this matter. That bad things sometimes happen to good people and good things happen to bad people seems uncontestable. In response, Eastern spiritualists invoke the notion of Karma: bad things happen only to those who deserve them; although it appears at times that bad things happen to good people, in fact those seemingly good people are working off their karmic

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debt from past lives. The doctrine of Karma, in concert with a belief in reincarnation, allows the conclusion that earthly life is, after all, rational and just. Dante would not accept the doctrine of Karma. Dante was convinced that perfect rationality and justice would be realized only in the afterlife. Still he insisted that vice is its own punishment and virtue is its own reward.

Seven deadly vices For Dante, the seven capital vices deeply affect a person’s character regardless of how fortune and other people respond. We become our sins in that our souls (understood as our inner characters) reflect the nature of our deeds. Regardless of how other people perceive us and of how luck favors us, who and what we are is an objective matter determined by the way we exercise our freedom—what we choose and do. For Dante, although a fuller dispensation of justice occurs in the afterlife, we do reap what we sow on earth. Thus, arrogance distorts and amplifies the self; alienates us from salutary human communities; and renders us empty and self-absorbed. Envy simmers in its own resentment; diminishes the self; and deepens our sense of inadequacy. Wrath wallows in spite; severs us from righteous elements in the community; and hardens our hearts. Sloth begins in joyless apathy and blossoms into hopelessness and muted selfabsorption. Avarice fastens us to a pendulum of frustration and relegates us to a quicksand of rapacious desire; we ignore the interests of others when we should not and become captive to our own insatiability. Gluttony, understood as excessive self-indulgence, diverts us from noble pursuits; weakens the resolve of our wills; and promotes unnecessary suffering. Lust replaces the human need for intimacy and bonding with the yearning to satisfy immediate cravings. As such, lust distances us from loving the proper things in the appropriate measure. Accordingly, Dante is firmly convinced that vice is its own punishment; our characters are reflected and formed by the way we exercise our freedom; and the condition of our characters is an objective matter. Indeed, the punishments Dante conjures in Hell and Purgatory are metaphors for what sinners have already made of themselves while living. The afterlife reflects infallibly what sinners have become through their choices and acts. For Dante, the law of contrapasso operates on earth, not merely in the afterlife: the punishment inflicted upon sinners must mirror the nature of their transgressions; penitents bring about their own destiny. They receive what they willed through their choices and actions.

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In that sense, Dante prefigured an existential theme. For example, in Sartre’s No Exit,7 the Hell depicted is not literal. Instead, Sartre describes how many people, through their choices and deeds, create their own hell on earth. As a secular existentialist, Sartre put no stock in an afterlife. By living inauthentically, wallowing in bad faith, immersing ourselves in received opinions, fleeing from responsibility, and the like, we forge our characters in feckless fashion. For Dante, Christian vices bring their own punishments; for Sartre, existentialist vices do the same. Similarly, for Nietzsche, to live as a “last man”—whose central interests revolve around trivial pursuits, a life of comfort, and social conformity—is to craft one’s character pathetically; for Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), to take solace in “das Man”—seeing myself as a member of a generic type and submerging myself into the crowd—is to manufacture one’s own craven existence; and for Albert Camus (1913-1960), to grasp for psychological crutches and to remain in denial about the human condition is to supplicate oneself before illusion. In all cases, existentialists regard these behaviors as the worst human vices that engender their own punishments. For Dante and existentialists, to flunk the test of crafting character is to fail life. Regardless of how fortune responds to us and how others perceive us, we are in the process of becoming certain people with particular characters that are forged from the way we exercise our freedom. Accordingly, concluding that vice is its own punishment and virtue is its own reward is more plausible than we might have first supposed. But what aspects of life should concern us most? The ancient Stoics offer a stern answer that will serve as our point of departure.

4. Take Responsibility for What is in Your Control: Stoicism “Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.” ʊ Elizabeth Gilbert

Prioritizing the elements of life that should be of greatest concern is no small task. The Stoics provided one answer that merits consideration: we should attend most carefully to those matters for which we are most responsible, those events that are totally within our control and that require that we exercise our freedom. All other aspects of life pale in significance because they are too greatly affected by external circumstances, the responses of other people, and the vicissitudes of fortune.

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Founded by Zeno of Citium (336-264 BC), Stoicism’s most famous early disciples were Cleanthes of Assos (331-232 BC) and Chrysippus of Soli (280-207 BC). Stoics were monotheists and adhered to natural law, a universal code of morality. Everything happens as it must happen, according to fate. The world-soul or Zeus or Nature directs everything for the best. Happiness flows from reasonableness, from understanding the natural law, and from judging and acting compatibly with natural law. Although external events are fated, our attitudes toward and judgments about those events are in our control. Unlike Platonists who believed that our world is a shadowy imitation of a higher reality, Stoics were materialists. Only bodies exist; but time, void, place, and the meanings of utterances subsist (exist as abstractions). Some entities, then, may not exist, but still be something.

Fundamental convictions Basic Stoic beliefs included the following: the gods exist and act providentially; the human soul is divine and immortal; the human will can earn freedom; the proper path to the good life is to follow nature; the universe is governed by natural law; the virtuous and the rational are united; the virtuous person is self-sufficient and happy; and moral duty requires human beings to live honorably. Most interesting is the view that human beings are not antecedently free, but the Stoic sage wins freedom by aligning his desires with natural law in accordance with god’s overall plan. Fate, then, is a continuous series of causes flowing from that plan and embodied in natural law. Stoics assumed that innate human tendencies—our natural dispositions—should be retained in any adequate rendering of human wisdom. They looked to the tendencies already present in newborn babies as strong evidence of what is innate in us. This approach is now known as the cradle argument: the fundamental drive of all living creatures is self-love, which is reflected in the tendency of babies to desire what supports health and to reject what does not. That which flows from nature and produces consequences in accord with nature is worthy. The first duty is to preserve one’s self in one’s natural condition; the second is to retain those things which are in accordance with nature and to repel those which are not; the third is choice conditioned by duty, once the principle of choice and rejection has been discovered; and the fourth is choice which is constant and in accordance with nature, at which final stage the good, properly so called, emerges and is understood in its true nature.8

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Two senses of the natural In their writings, Stoics conflate two different notions of “natural”: what is natural in terms of our biological inclinations (“the biologically natural”—what we are naturally inclined to do) and what is natural in terms of what will facilitate our fulfillment (“the normatively natural”— how our natures are best nurtured). But the two notions do not always converge. For example, we are not naturally inclined to adopt Stoicism. Learning and practicing that doctrine require proper instruction and the cultivation of appropriate habits. Thus, adopting Stoicism is unnatural in terms of our biological inclinations. But practicing Stoicism is presumably what best fulfills human nature. Thus, adopting Stoicism is natural in that doing so best serves our genuine interests. Stoics took happiness to be freedom from passion and the realization of inner peace. We should be indifferent to joy and grief, and flexible when facing life’s changes. Virtue and right attitude are enough for happiness. By living according to nature, elevating reason over the passions, nurturing good habits, freeing ourselves from the desire to change the unalterable, and being indifferent to pleasure and pain, we can achieve the inner peace that defines happiness. Distinguishing things within our control from things beyond our control is paramount. Our judgments, attitudes, and evaluations are the only things solely under our control. By controlling these we can attain right will and virtue. The usual litany of desirables—love, honor, wealth, good health, worldly success, avoiding maltreatment from others, the well-being of friends and relatives, congenial family life, personal freedom—depend too much on external circumstances beyond our control, including the actions of others.

Preferences and goods To understand the Stoical life, we must distinguish between three categories of events and things: preferred indifferents, nonpreferred indifferents, and goods. A preferred indifferent is an event or thing that human beings naturally and rationally desire from a biological standpoint; we prefer such events and things to their opposites (nonpreferred indifferents); but neither result—whether we attain a preferred indifferent or its opposite—promotes our goodness and happiness. In short, to prefer certain events and things to their opposites is biologically natural but either normatively neutral or normatively unnatural (if attaining the preferred indifferent thwarts our pursuit of the human good).

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A nonpreferred indifferent is an event or thing that human beings naturally and rationally do not desire from a biological standpoint; we do not prefer such events and things to their opposites (preferred indifferents); but being beset by nonpreferred indifferents does not set back our goodness and happiness. The human good is that which is by nature perfect; what is useful is in accord with the good; value is our estimation of the good. In short, following Plato and Socrates, Stoics understand the human good as defined by our inner conditions. Regardless of external events and the balance of preferred and nonpreferred indifferents a person accumulates, that person can attain the healthy, harmonious, virtuous, inner core that defines the human good. Because Zeus is not omnipotent, this is the best possible world in a limited sense. Obviously, non-preferred indifferents abound: natural disasters, pain and suffering, and human fragility and mortality. The world is ordered and functions only as well as Zeus’ powers extend. Thus, the more frequently spoken Stoic bromide is that external events of themselves are neither inherently good nor bad. Our attitudes and judgments about those events, though, are good or bad depending on whether they exercise reason well or poorly. If we judge that an external event is bad—when it is in fact indifferent to our flourishing—then the judgment, not the event, is bad. If we judge that an external event is irrelevant—when it is in fact irrelevant to our flourishing—then the judgment is good. Zeus has done the best he can for everyone given the structures available to him. Human beings are limited in their direct power to affect external events; we are responsible only for consequences flowing from our own judgments, attitudes, choices, and actions. What is outside our control need not and should not adversely influence our values or well-being. Although it is biologically natural and rational to prefer certain events to their opposites, Stoics insist that both results are irrelevant to human goodness and happiness. For example, they would understand that we would prefer one scenario, a warm lunch with a loved one, over another, the brutal murder of that loved one. They would deny that one scenario is better than the other in terms of facilitating a survivor’s good. They would understand that we would prefer, say, a gourmet Italian dinner to hunger. They would deny that the Italian dinner is better than hunger. Nothing is inherently good or evil other than moral virtue. Human beings label events as such. Eliminate the labels and we remove much needless anxiety and suffering. Stoics can thereby account for our preferences—we are not antecedently indifferent to numerous events—but retain their view that most outcomes are inherently neutral in terms of how they should affect our

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well-being (defined by our inner condition). By focusing on the inherent neutrality of events, Stoics aspire to mute our reactions to and judgments of them. The human good, our fulfillment or happiness, depends entirely on virtue. The virtuous person is happy and fulfilled regardless of circumstance and fortune. Thus, the citadel of the self is invulnerable. Once we understand that the good life is fully under our control, regardless of our station and the outrages of others, we are liberated. Our judgments, attitudes, choices, actions, and affective responses are internal to us and under our control. They can be evaluated with the coherent pattern that defines our lives. They are good or bad insofar as they facilitate or impair, respectively, our fulfillment as human beings. Thus, realizing my preferences is not part of my good, which consists of my character, beliefs, and actions. If I am a teacher, for example, I will want my students to learn and prosper. This motivation should spur me to do everything in my control to nurture those goals. But whether my students learn and prosper is not fully under my control and not, strictly speaking, part of my good. That I do all in my power to nurture those goals is under my control and is part of my good. In sum, pursuing robust health, material well-being, favorable reputation, and the like is appropriate for human beings, but achieving those goals is not truly good for us and failing in our quest is not genuinely bad for us. Unfortunately, human beings typically assume that attaining external goods is not merely a goal appropriate to pursue, but that realizing that goal is part of our good. Accordingly, we bemoan and mourn ill health, financial loss, diminished reputation, and the like because we wrongly conclude that our good has been set back. From a Stoic perspective, our false judgment makes us unwitting collaborators in needless misery. We also invite and cheer robust health, financial gain, favorable reputation and the like because we wrongly conclude that our good has been amplified. From a Stoic perspective, this false judgment distorts our vision and distracts us from what truly constitutes our good. Ultimately, our false beliefs generate emotional distress; correct epistemology is the remedy for better living. Stoics advise us to pursue our preferences as long as we do so with the understanding that our success in achieving external goods is not part of our genuine good and our failure to amass external goods is not a genuine setback.

Cognitive theory of the emotions The Stoics prefigure Sartre’s cognitive theory of the emotions. For the Stoics, emotional responses are not merely unreflective instincts or drives;

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they are judgments. Accordingly, human beings are responsible for their emotions because emotions are voluntary actions. Although our emotional responses are not under our conscious control at every specific instant, they flow from our beliefs and our evaluations of those beliefs. Even when we feel we are carried off by, say, anger or jealously to act against our self-interest, our emotional response follows from cognitive commitments: our rational assent to the truth of certain beliefs and to an evaluation that reacting angrily is appropriate to the situation. As such, our emotions are within our control because our cognitive commitments are within our control. Human beings concerned with actualizing their best potentials should eliminate most, if not all, emotional responses. Our emotional responses are rational in a descriptive sense: they originate cognitively in our beliefs and judgments. But our emotional responses are not rational in a normative sense: they depend on wrong attributions of value to events outside our control; and they mistakenly assume certain events and the realization of external goals are part of the human good. The Stoics insist that what is grounded in false beliefs should not be part of a wise person’s life plan. Hence, those aspiring to the best human life should eliminate emotional responses as much as possible. The Stoic condemnation of emotions, then, is grounded on the connection between sound epistemology and the human good. If our strong emotions and feelings originate from correct judgments about value, such reactions are valid. If I react strongly to, say, my accurate realization that I did not responded appropriately to an event that was completely within my control, my strong feelings are warranted. Although the initial strong feelings can serve a corrective function, we should also recognize that persistent self-flagellation and lingering self-recriminations typically serve no healthy purpose. Physical calamities cannot impair our internal condition unless we wrongly assent to some beliefs about them. Epistemological errors corrode our judgments, some of which solidify into wrongful emotions. For Stoics, forming judgments involves perception, evaluation, and understanding. Impressions, whether sense perceptions caused by observations or products of reasoning flowing from the mind, imprint themselves on the soul. We turn the impression into a proposition and then we either accept or reject the proposition. For example, we look in a certain direction and gain sense perceptions. We turn the sense perceptions into the proposition that “there is a dog relieving itself against a tree.” We then either accept or reject the proposition depending on, in this case, how certain we are that there truly is a dog relieving itself against a tree. Sometimes the proposi-

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tions we form may contain a value judgment such as “that a dog is relieving itself against a tree is a good (or bad) event.” According to Stoics, the impressions we get, the sense perceptions, are beyond our control. They imprint themselves on us. However, whether we accept or reject the propositions accompanying those impressions are within our control. Even Stoics may fall prey to “first movements”—being overwhelmed by the force of a first impression. If someone suddenly cracks me over the head with a club, I garner immediate impressions of pain. Instantaneously, I form the propositions, “I have been smacked upside the head; my head hurts; and this event is awful, unwarranted, unjust, and, in general, not conducive to my good.” However, I will have not at this point have wrongly concluded, from a Stoic perspective, that the physical injury is evil. I have succumbed only to a first movement, which is not a judgment but only an immediate reaction. I have not yet assented to the proposition that the physical injury is evil. I still have time to reconsider and affirm Stoic wisdom that only corrosions of my soul are genuinely evil and physical injury is merely a non-preferred indifferent. Accordingly, Stoics dismiss my spontaneous reaction to a first movement as essentially involuntary and even natural. For, aside from the Marquis de Sade and his fellow travelers, who enjoys being struck across the head? The proposition I formed consisted of both the sense perception (sensations of pain) forced upon me and the involuntary initial value judgment. But my final assent to or rejection of the value judgment marks me as a Stoic. For Stoics, external events are neither good nor evil. When I assent to a proposition containing in part a value judgment describing an external event, I stumble into epistemological error. In this manner, my emotional response to giving assent—“I am angry at the injustice of this evil assault”—is wrong, based on a mistaken judgment, and fully under my control.9 The cognitive and normative connections between beliefs and passions are straightforward: If I believe (a) that an event has occurred or is occurring; (b) that the event is bad or evil; and (c) that responding to it passionately is appropriate; then my emotions will flow. My emotions should cease when any of the three links are no longer accepted. Suppose I believe that Jones had spread lies about me. I also believe that my favorable reputation has been well-earned and is part of my good. I further believe that anger is an appropriate response to an undeserved wrong. In all probability, I will become angry. The intensity of my anger will be greatly influenced by how bad I believe the event to be and how appropriate I think an emotional response would be. Over time, as my beliefs cease to be

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fresh, my anger will typically, although not automatically, subside. (The adage that “vengeance is a dish best served cold” disputes what is typical.) But imagine that I immediately learn that the event never happened: Jones has said nothing about me. My anger will stop, although I will experience residual ill feelings and agitation. If someone asks, “Are you angry at Jones?” my answer must be “No.” Or imagine that Jones has spread lies about me, but I am an accomplished Stoic. I would prefer that Jones not lie about me, but I believe that the event of Jones spreading lies about me is neither part of my good nor part of my detriment. I also believe that anger is an inappropriate response to that which is neither good nor bad for me. In all probability, I will not become angry. From a Stoic vantage point, grief, for example, is “unhealthy, unmanly, unnatural and unnecessary; no one owes it to anyone, least of all to the gods; it accomplishes nothing, interferes with our doing what we should, and does nothing for the departed; it is absurd to care for the dead more than oneself; and in general, it contradicts Stoic values.”10 A critic of Stoicism might object that emotions are better viewed as the products of judgments or a complex judgment, not a simple judgment itself. If a loved one dies, I might judge that that event is bad and that grief is an appropriate response to such a bad event. As time passes, I may still judge that the event was bad, but my grief will subside in part because I no longer judge continued grieving to be an appropriate response to a distant event. A Stoic might respond by pointing out that my assent to or rejection of an impression, which triggers emotions such as anger and grief, reflects the inner disposition of my mind which is not identical to the inner disposition of your mind. The impression in and of itself is not enough to compel my assent or rejection. Our actions are ours in the sense that they flow from the internal condition of our minds. Yes, the state of our minds is greatly influenced by genetics, socialization, peer pressure, and the like, but those factors do not compel my dispositions to form as they do. Inner agency influences complex fated events and external causes. As does any position that accepts a strong version of fate, Stoics certainly have a problem with free will. What we take the scope and meaning of “fate” to be is crucial. In any event, regardless of the fragility of their theory, Stoics surely believed that human beings were responsible for their actions, and merited praise and blame in response to the quality of their deeds. If their theory cannot accommodate that conviction, modern Stoics need only adjust or dispense with their notion of fate. The Stoics’ moral programs and normative categories do not depend on accepting their traditional version of fate. The tie-in to fate only solidifies a person’s ac-

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ceptance of everyday events because they are supposedly decreed by Zeus: loyalty to god requires acceptance of external happenings. Fate, then, is invoked to motivate human beings to embrace the inevitable. But this reinforcement is not genuinely required for the Stoic moral regimen.

Objections to Stoicism The Stoic doctrine that only states of mind are good or bad leads to a too easy acceptance of social, political, and economic inequalities and wrongs. Dismissing matters in these domains as merely preferred indifferents trivializes human misery caused by poverty and oppression, and defers too facilely to physical deprivations generated by tyrannies. The notion that human beings can be happy—in the sense of being fulfilled by attaining their human telos—while being tortured reduces Stoic doctrine to absurdity. Only if we are being tortured for a higher cause that defines our life’s mission—witness the martyr, hero, or saint—can such a view be plausible. Does complying with Stoic doctrine itself constitute such a project? Is a project that teaches us to place value only on our internal states of mind sufficiently noble to fit that bill? Moreover, Stoicism’s view of preferred indifferents calls into question our settled convictions about charitable deeds. Stoicism can be unappealingly insular and egoistic. For example, Epictetus when advising a person who was concerned about his slave’s virtue, sputtered: “It is better for your servant to become vicious than for you to become unhappy (EN 12).” After all, the virtue of other people may well be, at most, a preferred indifferent. Whether others are vicious or not should not affect my well-being. As for charitable contributions, consequences are unclear. On one hand, I might be generous with my material possessions because I view them as indifferents. On the other hand, I might see charitable contributions as irrelevant and possibly a hindrance to the genuine good of the disenfranchised. Perhaps recognizing health, food, and clothing as preferred indifferents would tip the scale in favor of donating to those in material need. Oddly, my willingness to donate or not to donate is motivated by my Stoic conviction that the money or things I donate are not genuine goods. So in either case the phenomenon of charitable contributions is radically altered from contemporary understandings. We typically consider feeding the hungry, clothing the poor, providing shelter for the homeless, and the like, paradigm cases of morally praiseworthy actions. Indeed, such actions are extolled in the sacred texts of religions and endorsed equally by secular humanists. However, under Epictetus’ philosophy, philanthropists have performed no significant service

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for the downtrodden. Donors have only satisfied the yearning for preferred indifferents, while providing no automatic benefit for the goodness of the souls of disenfranchised people. Would it have been better to have slipped starving people a treatise on Stoicism so they might learn that their wellbeing lies not in food but in proper judgment? Perhaps a Stoic lecture on why the content of their character, not a satisfied belly or a clothed body, is the key to happiness? If time was a factor, maybe a few kernels of Stoic wisdom: No harm can befall a starving, destitute, impoverished person unless he is an unwitting collaborator; the only evil is in misjudgments, not in physical deprivations; the yearning for preferred indifferents, including food, clothing, and shelter, is the root of all evil; difficult circumstances should be viewed as a test of character; the more one has, the more one has to lose; if a circumstance is genuinely unbearable, suicide is always a wise option? Indeed, perhaps our imaginary philanthropists, by providing the basic necessities of survival, have reinforced the yearning of the destitute for preferred indifferents and unwittingly added to their longterm misery. Would it have been better to console them by reading Stoic chapter and verse on the true sources of good and evil as they starved to death? We might be tempted to tweak Stoic doctrine. Perhaps we should be concerned with something to the extent it is under our control. We should attend to events in proportion to how much control we have over them. Still, the doctrine is unsatisfying. A single person has little control over world peace, repercussions from natural disasters, and the prevention of major wars, yet such events are reasonable foci of our attention. Maybe we need to add a dimension: We should be concerned with something to the extent it is under our control and in proportion to its effects on the common good. This addition to Stoic doctrine would allow us to attend to major world and national events even though individuals have meager control over them. But this amendment is not enough. Sometimes we should invest significant emotion in events over which we have no control and which do not seriously harm the common good. The loss of people whom we cherished and the destruction of our dearest projects are two such cases. Even if those losses do not measurably detract from the common good and even if we have no control over them, sorrow is appropriate. Contrary to mainstream Stoicism, Nietzsche teaches that our struggles with suffering are a crucial part of creating worthy characters. What about positive emotions? Are they always irrational? Not automatically. Some leeway exists for Stoics to extol gratitude, friendship, and even love, but we must be careful. If events are neither good nor bad then symmetry of judgment requires that we should not cultivate positive emo-

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tions in reaction to our belief that a good event has occurred. The only exception might be events that benefit our attainment of Stoic virtue. Such events would be genuine goods in that they nurture the only worthy Stoic goal; they do not merely facilitate our obtaining preferred indifferents, they nurture Stoic virtue. So a Stoic student who has learned at the feet of a great Stoic teacher-sage has legitimate reason for positive emotion toward him. The imagined student would judge, correctly, that something good has occurred; that the sage has brought that good about; and that gratitude, friendship, even love is an appropriate response. So gratitude, friendship, and love may be genuine Stoic emotions, at least insofar as they are directed toward those who helped us achieve the human good. Would this not entail, though, that a student who has been misled as a youth by a renegade teacher away from Stoic teachings would have genuine cause for anger? Perhaps not. The charlatan instructor, the Stoics would insist, must have acted from ignorance not malevolence. Unless he is culpable for his ignorance, he is not morally responsible for his shoddy instruction. The problems afflicting Stoicism and its use of a cognitive theory of the emotions are numerous and deeply entrenched. First, the Stoic interpretations of the nature of events are stunningly unpersuasive. Under the first interpretation, with the possible exception of happenings that directly nurture or frustrate Stoic virtue, events are neither good nor bad. Mass murders and selfless philanthropies, and everything in between, do not bear any inherent evil or goodness. At most, Stoics would concede that mass murders destroy and philanthropies advance the preferred indifferents of certain people, but that is not enough to label the acts as genuinely bad or genuinely good. Only by adopting such a position can Stoics deride the so-called negative emotions as erroneous. Non-Stoics would unanimously criticize the Stoic interpretation of events as unbelievable. Second, the Stoic belief, cadged from Socrates, that vice invariably flows from ignorance is unconvincing. From the earliest times, thinkers understood that human beings often act wrongly from weakness of the will. We know the good but do not pursue it because doing so is difficult or inconvenient. Moreover, at times we harbor self-destructive or selfundermining tendencies that lure us toward evil. At other times, we often privilege our own perceived benefit over the well-being of others. Our prisons are stocked with criminals who understood clearly what a morally right action was but still lurched in the direction of evil. Third, if some events are evil and if their perpetrators are sometimes morally culpable for their occurrences, then the question whether anger is an appropriate response is reopened. Stoics would still insist that anger

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lacks salutary effects: it cannot alter the past and it clouds our assessment of how to respond in the present. In this, Stoics are undoubtedly correct, at least to a point. Where anger distorts our vision and jeopardizes our judgment, it is an inappropriate indulgence. But is that always the case? Cannot anger help steel our resolve and energize our motivation for righteous action? Anger, in contrast to counterproductive wrath, is a biologically natural emotion that often promotes human survival, a way of amassing psychological resources for robust action. Of course, taken to an extreme, anger destroys relationships and unsettles social fabric. But systematically suppressing anger may also be harmful. Suppressed anger may cause physical illness, explode into misplaced violence, or promote the manufacture of social scapegoats. That anger is sometimes, even often, a poor strategy for attaining our ends does not mean that it always is. Even religious paragons, such as Jesus, occasionally displayed anger. Are not some outrages so profoundly destructive and unforgettably evil that they merit anger? In the same way that mourning is an appropriate response to the loss of a loved one under tragic circumstances, anger is sometimes an appropriate response to wrongdoing and injustice. If extended inappropriately, mourning can easily morph into unseemly self-pity. If widely practiced and indiscriminately nurtured, anger can quickly transform to a weapon of manipulation and mass destruction. Understanding the dangers should serve as a caution. The elimination of the so-called negative emotions, though, is ill-advised. We need to magically transform our perceptions of the world to cope with an environment otherwise largely beyond our making. Anger, sorrow, and the like are sometimes artful strategies for attaining our ends. The Stoics wisely advise us that we are too often unwitting collaborators in producing needless suffering because we obsess over an unalterable past and matters that are beyond our control. But they exaggerate their insights into overall prescriptions for the good human life that are minimal and uninspiring. To invigorate our spirits, energize our convictions, and thereby amplify the self we shall turn to Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC).

5. Develop a Sense of Honor: Marcus Tullius Cicero “Honor must start in the heart, but if it ends there, it isn’t honor. Honor must be expressed through words, symbols, actions, or gestures. Honor is among the most incarnational of the virtues. It must have feet and hands.” ʊ Douglas Wilson

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Should not our journey on earth be informed by a commitment to particular values, to an allegiance to special principles of conduct that significantly constitutes who we are? In order to help define our identities, must not such principles go beyond the obvious prescriptions and prohibitions of conventional society? Must not our commitment to such values be so powerful as to leave us feeling diminished—because we have betrayed our selves—when we transgress their authority? If you answer “yes” to such questions then you should be inclined to consider a contemporary defense of the notion of honor. Prior to offering that defense, I will lay its foundation by recalling a classical invocation of honor advanced by Cicero. Cicero was a Renaissance man centuries before that phrase had been coined. Lawyer, orator, politician, poet, and philosopher, Cicero was the most versatile intellectual of his time. Cicero, whose entire political life was spurred by his dependence on external validation, nevertheless warned against the quest for fame and glory. True honor rests in honorable deeds, not reputation. He grants that heroic, honorable men generally expect enduring glory as their merited reward. But that expectation is dangerous as it nurtures the thirst for war as a means of attaining fame. Those who care little for glory, on the other hand, should not use their muted ambition as a disgraceful excuse to retreat from public life (O 1.65, 1.71). That Roman traditions and practices celebrated the pursuit of fine reputation and enduring glory is beyond dispute. The Roman notion of honor was grounded in physical and mental strength, ruthless competition, pride in bloodlines, and the pursuit of glory in what they took to be zero-sum contexts: gain can be won only through someone else’s loss.11 The political and military arenas were the main forums in which to manifest honor and pursue glory: “Only by seeing himself reflected in the gaze of his fellows could a Roman truly know himself a man.”12 Idleness, passivity, and muted ambition were unworthy behaviors and motivations. How can one reconcile (a) Cicero’s own persistent glory-seeking actions, which were in accord with Roman traditions and practices with (b) his apparently Stoical critique of glory in parts of De Officiis? The easiest, but inaccurate, conclusion is to cite the paradox as evidence of Cicero’s inconsistency or nagging ambivalence or flaccid eclecticism. A more careful and charitable reading of Cicero reveals two renderings of glory: descriptive and normative. The descriptive notion is merely factual—a person may gain fame, honor, and reputation. But such celebrity is worthless and dangerous unless it is linked to appropriate deeds. The normative notion adds an evaluative element—a person should gain fame, honor, and reputation only for those actions that exude merit. Cicero’s own quest for enduring glory was allegedly fueled by his commitment to the common

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good. Actions pursuant to that end should be publicly acknowledged, both to encourage future normatively glorious deeds and as a deserved reward for political achievements. The Romans recognized no difference between moral excellence and reputation, having the same word, honestas, for both . . . Praise was what every citizen most desired . . . To place personal honor above the interests of the entire community was the behavior of a barbarian . . . citizens were schooled to temper their competitive instincts for the common good . . . in their relations with other states, however, no such inhibitions cramped them.13

Cicero’s critique of glory, then, is not Stoical in the least: he does not caution against the pursuit of honor and reputation because he suspects such external goods, depending so much on luck and social circumstances, should be matters of indifference to the sage. Instead, his critique centers on the pursuit of glory severed from its normative moorings. For Cicero, the Julius Caesars of the world gain undeserved glory because their efforts undermine the common good and eviscerate the civic fabric of the republic (O 1.26). The most ambitious men in Cicero’s time had lost sight of the distinction between descriptive and normative glory. Personal advantage, expediency writ small, was jeopardizing the common good. The pursuit of material aggrandizement, military and political success loosened from republican values, and personal gain as such were overrunning Cicero’s vision of the free republic (O 1.25). The passion for glory had been disconnected from its traditional Roman meaning. A.A. Long sums the matter up well: In his earlier speeches, Cicero had no hesitation in identifying himself as intensely ambitious for glory and in regarding the survival of glory beyond one’s lifetime as the only spur to patriotic achievement . . . As the years passed, however, his comments on glory become more qualified and equivocal . . . [The reason for the difference] is Cicero’s recognition that passion for glory was degenerating into a euphemism for personal ambition at the expense of the health and stability of society.14

Genuine, enduring glory is won by the love, admiration, and respect of the people (O 2.31, 2.38). Such popularity is properly attained only through just actions. The pursuit of glory, when normatively sound, remained for Cicero a crucial and required aspiration for noble statesmen. Justified attributions of glory advance the common good and vivify the healthy republic: “Roman citizens who conducted themselves properly . . . were said to enjoy fama ‘a good reputation’ and existimatio [dignity that

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could be preserved, lost, diminished or restored, but not increased] . . . When these possessions were damaged, the citizen suffered infamia [disgrace].”15 Cicero grants that human beings have an interest in being recognized in accord with the quality of their deeds, and society has an interest in recognizing individuals accordingly. Again, meritorious actions should be publicly acknowledged, both to encourage future normatively glorious deeds and as a deserved reward for political achievements. When the deserving are not so recognized their interests have been set back: they have been harmed to that extent. When undeserving people are wrongly recognized their interests have been falsely amplified: they have been undeservedly advantaged. Moreover, honestas has a striking social component for Cicero: erroneous notions of glory corrupt the republic. The health of society depends in part on proper (normative) understandings of glory which mold the ambitions of powerful men. The objective common good is enhanced by a proper understanding of glory and undermined by an improper understanding. If the individual’s well-being is ultimately connected to the well-being of the republic, as Cicero often alleges, then the meting out of glory is critical from the standpoint of sound social policy: “the derivation [of honestas] and the uses [Cicero] makes of it closely identity it with honor: a morality that is grounded in respect, associated with belonging to a group, and with sanctions for behavior determined by the group.”16

The concept of honor Cicero did not advance an elaborate analysis of the notion of honor, but within the Roman understanding of the pursuit of normative glory reside the building blocks of a concept of personal honor that became influential for centuries. Although the term “honor” has been used in a variety of contexts throughout history, a reasonable rendering of personal honor can be reconstructed.17 I take personal honor to be a measure of an individual’s value that involves: x a set of imperatives (the “honor code”) that constrains an agent’s choices and actions; x the honor code arises from a group affiliation that the agent has either antecedently chosen or posteriorly accepted (internalized) as the agent’s own; x the honor code does not necessarily correlate to society’s professed moral principles, policies, and standards;

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x the force of the honor code cannot be destroyed or softened by considerations of expediency, utility, or personal advantage—the pursuit of personal honor and the desire for material profit are conflicting aims; x living up to and complying with the honor code often involves personal risk or sacrifice to the agent up to and including death; x living up to and complying with the honor code, which confers status, is tightly bound to the agent’s sense of identity and self-worth; x the agent judges and evaluates himself or herself in large part in accord with how the agent perceives the way others who are capable —the group members who are qualified to assess—judge and evaluate the agent given the agent’s compliance with the honor code, and how the agent judges his or her compliance with the honor code; x a positive evaluation in that regard is a source of deserved, deepened self-respect and pride, and a more profound sense of belonging; x a negative evaluation, which follows a known failure to live up to the honor code, is taken by the agent and others as disreputable, as manifesting a weakness of character, and as a betrayal of the group ethos; x a recognition by the agent that he or she deserves such a negative evaluation typically elicits shame, a loss of self-respect and pride, and weakens the sense of belonging; x a recognition by the group members qualified to assess that the agent deserves such a negative evaluation is typically followed by censure up to and including exclusion from group membership unless the agent regains his or her honor; x to have personal honor is to possess a right to be treated as having a certain value and includes the right to respect and to be treated as an equal within the group; x to lose personal honor is to relinquish those rights by failing to live up to the honor code; x personal honor can be infringed upon by insults, which by themselves neither impair the agent’s reputation nor diminish the agent’s inner worth, but which fail to treat the agent commensurate with his or her rights; x honor codes typically include an imperative of response: if someone impugns the agent’s honor, the agent must respond in the prescribed fashion; otherwise the agent’s honor is diminished or destroyed.

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The set of imperatives that structure a person’s choices and actions is the honor code that arises from the group to which the person belongs. The nature of the honor code varies in relation to time, place, group, and social setting. In each context, a group tries to capture the meaning of “honor” for a particular set of values. Sometimes people belong to a group by virtue of ratifying what originally were unchosen attachments such as the class into which they are born; the nation in which they were raised; their ethnic, religious, or racial inheritance; and the like. At other times, people choose their group affiliations by entering clubs and teams, or pursuing causes with others with whom they share purposes. In all such cases, the group affiliation becomes constitutive of personal identity insofar as it is connected to honor. Although many group affiliations are peripheral to a person’s self-image and merely pleasing ways to pass time, what distinguishes an honor group is that ongoing connection to it is critical to a person’s sense of self. This is true regardless of whether the person entered the group by choice or first discovered and later ratified his or her affiliation. The importance of “honor,” then, is intricately linked to our sense of self and to community. While it is plausible that a person might conjure an individualistic, unique code of honor applicable only to himself or herself, typically the concept of honor is connected strongly to group or institutional roles. The person crafts his or her identity within such roles and to separate or be severed from them is to alter the topography of the self. Accordingly, the notion of honor will glisten most brightly in settings that stress communal attachments, institutional roles, and social bonds. The appeal of honor is felt most vividly in young people coming of age and in older people. Those of intermediate ages are typically concerned mainly with building careers, raising families, and securing a measure of material gain. Although these connections admit exceptions, the general trends pertain. An honor code need not correlate to a nation’s rendering of morality. As mentioned, groups try to define “honor” in accord with their own particular values. As such, “honor” cannot be tied necessarily to the imperatives of conventional morality. Honor among felons is certainly possible. A criminal enterprise may define “honor” in terms of remaining silent when arrested and thereby protecting fellow criminals from prosecution; always responding, even disproportionately, to perceived slights, insults, and demonstrations of disrespect; manifesting respect to superiors within the enterprise by certain ritualized behaviors and by sharing with them the proceeds of criminal ventures; being careful to never inappropriately address or treat family members within the group; providing material and emotional support to the families of group members who fulfilled the hon-

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or code and are incarcerated by the authorities; and observing the rule that received benefits create obligations that must later be fulfilled as an expression of gratitude. In living up to such an honor code, a group member will often transgress conventional morality because of the nature of the honor group. However, the success of honor codes tied to criminal enterprises requires a wider cultural setting that prizes small-scale community and trades upon profound distrust of governmental authority. In the United States, where the rhetoric of individualism has always been powerful, criminal honor codes became less successful when law enforcement responded with devices such as immunity from prosecution as a reward for cooperating with the authorities; the witness protection program to safeguard those who cooperate; the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), a federal law that provides for extended criminal penalties and a civil cause of action for acts performed as part of an ongoing criminal organization; and various rewards to those who informally divulge to police. At least as important to dismantling the success of criminal honor codes was a change in the wider social settings: old world smallscale community and family understandings were replaced by new world individualism and freedom from socially-imposed roles. The more important point is that the imperatives of codes of honor not only are often not required by morality or law, but they may also conflict with moral or legal demands. In such cases, the power of honor codes is felt most intensely because their demands upon agents are grave. In any event, the power of honor codes is designed to trump considerations of expediency and personal advantage. The values embodied by the honor code are taken to have the greatest call upon the agent’s allegiance in part because they are most definitive of personal identity. The Italian proverb noted in the dedication to this work illustrates that point: Meglio onore senza vita che vita senza onore (“Better to die with honor than to live with shame”). To live with shame is to eviscerate and betray the self, deny one’s innermost values, and impoverish one’s entire life. To die with honor is to enhance one’s biography by validating one’s inner worth and higher values. Fulfilling the imperatives of an honor code often conflicts sharply with short-term self-interest and preservation. Where the risk or sacrifice to the agent is greatest, the greatest honor is merited. Thus, honor often conflicts with prudence, which weighs risks, tallies and compares advantages and disadvantages, and selects the course of action promising the greater probability of gain. Those subscribing to an honor code evaluate themselves largely in terms of several vectors: Have I complied with the honor code? How do

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the group members who are most qualified to assess my compliance with the honor code evaluate my compliance? How does the group judgment influence my evaluation? How does my evaluation influence the group judgment? My behavior will manifest whether I embody the personal qualities that entitle me to honor and qualified group members will recognize my inner worth or lack thereof by their assessments of my compliance with the code. My evaluation of my inner worth will depend greatly on how the relevant others perceive me. My sense of worth and honor does not depend on the perceptions of other people in general. Instead, I trust only those within the honor group, especially those who have proven themselves the most experienced and capable evaluators. I can retain my honor in the face of negative evaluations from outsiders, but I cannot do so when confronted by those I take to be most qualified to judge: those whom I respect as fellow members of our honor group. Attributes of honor, then, are bound to complex relations and the interplay of several evaluations. No single assessment—whether by the agent or by the honor group—is sufficient. Each assessment is linked closely to other assessments. The overall evaluation embodies the dynamic tension of its constitutive units. To have conferred and to confer upon oneself a favorable evaluation of one’s honor is to cultivate a deserved, deepened self-respect and pride, and a more profound sense of belonging to the honor group: I have lived up to a difficult set of imperatives; a set most other human beings would be unable to fulfill; I have placed principles over narrow self-interest and have renounced the easy path; I have kept the faith with my vows of compliance and thereby proved my worth. To have conferred and to confer upon oneself a negative evaluation of one’s honor is to recognize failure and to lose status: I have failed to live up to the honor code; I have chosen expediency over principle; I have betrayed myself and the honor group; and I have demonstrated the poverty of my spirit. In such cases, the appropriate response is shame, a loss of selfrespect and pride, and a weakened sense of belonging to the honor group. My inadequacy and disgrace are evident to those qualified to evaluate my inner worth on the basis of my failure to fulfill the honor code. Once the group members recognize that a fellow member deserves a negative evaluation, they administer some form of censure up to and including exclusion from group membership unless the agent regains his or her honor. To violate the honor code is to choose to risk forfeiting membership in the group. Depending upon the specific honor code at issue, a disgraced member may be punished or simply banished. Under the most primitive codes, punishment may mean death. Some honor codes permit

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shamed members to restore their honor through prescribed actions. Other honor codes insist that once honor is lost it is forever gone. Moreover, depending on the nature of the honor code and my connection to it, my loss of honor may also shame my family or the honor group itself. To have personal honor is to possess a right to be treated as having a certain value and includes the right to respect and to be treated as an equal within the group. To lose personal honor is to relinquish those rights by failing to live up to the honor code. In addition, one’s personal honor can be infringed upon by insults, which by themselves neither impair the agent’s reputation nor diminish the agent’s inner worth, but which fail to treat the agent commensurate with his or her rights. The transgressor has failed in his or her duty to treat the honorable person in accord with that person’s value. In such cases, honor codes typically include an imperative of response: if someone impugns the agent’s honor, the agent must respond in the prescribed fashion; otherwise the agent’s honor is diminished or destroyed.

Are honor codes obsolete? Reliance upon honor codes, other than in the military, police, criminal organizations, and the like, strikes most contemporary thinkers as anachronistic. The notion of “honor” conjures images of knightly combat; duels arising from perceived insults; ongoing vendettas whose originating causes have been long forgotten; and murders resulting from husbands who have been cuckolded or fathers whose daughters have been sexually violated. Invoking “honor” recalls class-based societies in which personal identity was closely allied with social roles; times when the only honor available to women centered on retaining chastity. Even the vestiges of honor in paramilitary and criminal enterprises underscore the masculine, violent, antagonistic foundations of such codes. Such vestiges remind us that much of the history of honor is bound to male bravery, machismo, and eagerness to avenge all perceived insults, aspects of social life that may strike us now as out of place. We might well be tempted to conclude that the virtual disappearance of honor codes and invocations of honor are events to be cheered. For example, two years ago, in an academic unit at my institution, a professor, whom I will call Giordano, opposed a colleague’s application for promotion to the rank of professor. Although Giordano held that colleague in high esteem, his evaluation was based on the fact that the colleague had not published a book. In the history of this academic department no faculty member had been promoted to the rank of professor

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without having published at least one book. Although this requirement was not expressed in any written document it was longstanding tradition and transmitted by word of mouth. In Giordano’s letter of evaluation he argued that to accept a promotion only because others were willing to confer it even in the absence of one of the longstanding necessary conditions brought no honor to the candidate. Moreover, that others were willing to confer the promotion under such circumstances brought no honor to them. Giordano’s argument was grounded in the conviction that the other evaluators and the candidate were breaking the department code of honor in the interests of expediency: having no stake in opposing the majority and having little regard for the value of traditional scholarship anyway, the institution’s management would endorse the majority position and grant the promotion. Understanding this, the other evaluators seized the opportunity to advance the interests of a valued member of the academic unit. Thus, the highly regarded, likeable colleague would receive the promotion under a lower standard than previously employed by the academic unit. In Giordano’s judgment, such a promotion besmirched the honor of the recipient and those who championed his cause. In Giordano’s view, they had placed expediency and a colleague’s short-term interests above principle. Also, they had rendered no long-range service to their colleague by not requiring that he accomplish what he was fully capable of attaining. Having read Giordano’s evaluation, the Dean was taken aback by the reference to “honor.” He dismissed it as irrelevant and his remarks stressed that he perceived no place for such a consideration in academe or anywhere else. The Dean’s comments tracked clearly what is probably the predominant contemporary assessment of invocations of honor: they are pernicious vestiges of historical periods that have been rightfully eclipsed.

The case for honor That honor in the past has been most closely associated with patriarchal prerogatives, aristocratic privileges, and violent reprisals is undeniable. But nothing in the concept of “honor” requires such linkages. As stated previously, the history of “honor” is the effort of various groups to capture the term for a specific set of values and virtues. The case for nurturing a sense of honor is compelling. Allegiance to a notion of honor and cultivating the character traits required to behave in ways consistent with that notion connect a person to wider community. Assuming that the values embodied by the notion of honor at issue are worthy, they vivify personal identity and fulfill the human need for intimate bonding with others. A salutary honor code provides imperatives that

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are not subject to barter or considerations of expediency. Such imperatives infuse life with meaning and purpose. For those who are firmly convinced, as I am, that if there is nothing worth dying for then there is nothing worth living for, a sense of honor frames a person’s bedrock convictions. The right to be treated as having a certain worth is most resplendent when it is conditioned on the demonstration of the personal qualities that entitle a person to that right. That others within the honor group—those who share allegiance to the imperatives of the honor code—recognize that a fellow member has the requisite personal qualities reinforces the sense of that person’s inner worth. In opposition to the Stoics, how other people judge us does and should matter to our own evaluations and understandings of who we are. In opposition to those with an impoverished sense of self who are vulnerable to all external evaluations, only the judgments of some other people should matter—those who are most qualified to render fair, accurate assessments; those who are the other people who matter most to us. Popular opinion in and of itself bears little recommendation. A sense of deserved pride is the reward of fulfilling the requirements of a salutary honor code. Justified pride in our accomplishments and in our personal characters animates the quest for excellence. Yes, if exaggerated, pride amplifies into arrogance and vanity: an unjustified sense of superiority that exalts the self by diminishing others. But if justified and measured, pride is seemingly the basis of self-respect that is presupposed in our ability to love self and others. Is not pride, if deserved, merely a justified sense of self-worth? Moreover, even from a religious standpoint, pride seems necessary to maximize our highest potentials and thereby glorify God’s bestowed gifts. Without pride and the desire to excel, we court passivity and slothfulness. Indeed, pride ignites heroism and underwrites most great attainments in the world. In short, a healthy pride spurs our best efforts, vivifies our quest for meaning and purpose, and protects us from resignation when adversity stings us. The case against pride is primarily biblical (Proverbs 16:18-19; Luke 4:1-11; Luke 18:9-14; Romans 5:6). Pride corrodes judgment and facilitates sin. By luxuriating in our attainments and savoring our development, we jeopardize our connection to wider community and to the divine. We set ourselves apart, regarding ourselves as special or even unique, while evaluating others as less capable. We incline toward excessive love of self and objects that glorify the self—such as fame, awards, and social station—instead of focusing on spiritual goods. The most horrifying human acts bloom from the soil of pride. Wars, murders, rapes, terrorism, and the like, are perpetrated not by the self-effacing and apathetic, but by those fueled by an inflated sense of entitlement and excessive self-worth. Worse,

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pride supplies an unworthy motivation for performing deeds that seem from an external standpoint to be virtuous. We are all familiar with the charity worker who benefits the disenfranchised more from a sense of superiority than from genuine concern for their welfare: “Hey, look at me, I am doing what the better people always do, helping my social inferiors.” Still, the indictment against pride is excessive. Religious tradition instructs us to love our neighbor as ourselves. This presupposes that selflove as such is not sinful, but a requirement of fulfilling our duty to love others. Accordingly, pride, insofar as it is self-love, is necessary for discharging moral obligation. Pride, as justifiable appreciation of the self, would appear to be unavoidable and even recommended. Pride requires robust communal connections to secure its value. What justifies pride is personal excellence, stellar achievements, and uncommon worth. Such achievements need not be historic. Small tasks done with exceptional skill and diligence give rise to justified pride. Intelligence, creativity, determination, imagination, overcoming significant obstacles, and maximizing one’s highest potentials help constitute that skill and diligence. Recognition by others and the acclaim of the masses often accompany such skill and diligence, but are unnecessary to their existence.

Arrogance The spectacular problem is that pride so easily amplifies to arrogance or vanity: excessive, idolatrous, misdirected, and inaccurate selfappreciation. Arrogance is love of self wrongly diverted to contempt and hatred of others. Arrogance or vanity is redolent with the stench of epistemological and moral error, and scoffs contemptuously at community. Arrogance shuns moral duty as unworthy of pursuit. Arrogance struggles mightily to render the self invulnerable. Arrogance is unreasonable, inaccurate, excessive, and narcissistic. As such, arrogance hardens our hearts to intimacy, spiritual and earthly, and celebrates self-aggrandizement as an intrinsic good. As with all vices, arrogance corrodes the self and eviscerates human relationships. Arrogance persuades us that we are more than we are; that we must demean those who may seem more exalted; that others are less worthy and deserve our scorn and condescension; that we are exceptions to the supposed moral law; that the good life is relentless striving for ever more recognition and status; that victories in zero-sum contests are the measure of greatness. The citadel of the self becomes impenetrable and supreme. As such, arrogance denies the need for community and thereby reneges on moral duties to others: the arrogant are selfish in that they ignore the interests of others when they should not.

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Pride so easily grows into arrogance that we must be ever vigilant and self-assessing. Perhaps arrogance is unavoidable, from a practical standpoint, and we must admit to being sinners. We must supplicate ourselves in the knowledge that pride, as a condition of fulfilling moral duty, will perhaps inevitably fatten into arrogance, which threatens our humanity and contaminates our relationships. Although we cannot extinguish the problem, which lies at the core of the human condition, we can minimize its deleterious effects and remain resolute (and humble) in our predicament.

Individualism and community Throughout history, many writers have argued that internal tension is at the heart of human experience: our yearning for intimate connection with others and the recognition that others are necessary for our identity and freedom coalesce uneasily with the fear and anxiety we experience as others approach.18 We simultaneously long for emotional attachment yet are horrified that our individuality may evaporate once we achieve it. If we experience too much individuality we risk alienation, estrangement, and psychological isolation. If we experience insufficient individuality we court emotional suffocation, loss of self-esteem, and unhealthy immersion in the community. This disharmony may never be fully reconciled once and forever, and so we find ourselves making uneasy compromises and adjustments during our life’s journey as we oscillate along the continuum whose endpoints are “radical individuality” and “thorough immersion in community,” respectively. This internal tension replicates itself at numerous levels: the individual confronts family, the family confronts wider community, communities confront society, and society confronts the state. The individual confronts others, of varying numbers and powers, at many different levels. As we meet others at institutional and not merely personal levels, the stakes rise in some respects. Our need to retain individual freedom and resist coercion intensifies when our relations are impersonal, where we experience less direct control over our destiny, and when entrenched bureaucracies seem ready and able to usurp our autonomy. Our dilemmas deepen as we choose and mold the appropriate forums in which to live out the human drama of individualism versus community. The aggravated dangers accompanying societal and state levels recommend strategies to moderate the perceived threats and amplify the potential benefits. As ever, our sense of possibility will be a major player in our solutions. Circumscribed by socioeconomic reality, the relentless socializing of the established order, and the inherent inertia of the masses, our

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sense of possibility resists extinction and thereby celebrates the human craving for going beyond our current context. The notion of honor underscores the importance of our yearning for community and healthy attachment to institutional roles. Whereas philosophical movements such as existentialism and libertarianism extol the human need for freedom and transcendence, honor groups provide balance by highlighting communal values. Reaching an accommodation within our conflicts between individualism and community is critical for human wellbeing. An appropriate appreciation for honor can aid that accommodation. The notion of honor connects the individual to a project that transcends the narrow concerns of the self. People with a sense of honor privilege the imperatives of the honor code and take compliance with those imperatives as one of their higher values. In societies where the yearning for individualism has amplified dangerously into self-indulgence, narcissism, and the pursuit of popularity, the notion of honor provides a communal antidote by championing a sense of duty, sacrifice, and reward only for merit. Compliance with the imperatives of an honor code can motivate us to act contrary to strictly personal desires in deference to community obligations. Connection to honor codes is thus one way to distance ourselves from a purely atomistic notion of the self. Accordingly, in my view, a sense of honor and a connection to an honor code are requirements of leading a robustly meaningful, valuable life. The critical questions center on the type of values and virtues that should capture the meaning of “honor” and the appropriate imperatives that should define a beneficial honor code. To attain their highest renderings, our experiences of honor and justified pride must arise from the context of an authentic human life. Clarifying such a context is the stock and trade of existential philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), and Friedrich Nietzsche.

6. Be Authentic: Martin Heidegger “Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” ʊ George Bernard Shaw

A person who embodies “authenticity” is someone who is genuine, who exudes a sense of integrity, and who forges a coherent identity from multiple, often conflicting inner drives. To be judged “authentic” is to be praised and to be labeled “inauthentic” is to be disparaged in some sense. But exactly how does a person attain authenticity? What obstacles must be

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overcome? Is being authentic necessary and/or sufficient for leading a good human life? Martin Heidegger gave to existentialism the terminology of authenticity. He described inauthentic human living as distinguished by wrongly denying freedom and succumbing to false ideas of inevitability. He suggests at least five, partially overlapping, ways in which I might be living inauthentically by denying my individuality.19 For Heidegger, living inauthentically is the greatest human vice and various forms of self-deception are its most common cause. I am sunk in everydayness if I live in the “they” and consider myself as das Man—which roughly connotes generic humankind; thinking and acting in accord with “what one does” or “what people do”; subjugating myself to the mass of others; regarding myself as a member of a kind or type. If I accept the seductions of conformity, then a banal life of habit and routine, punctuated by diversions follows. A particular example of this is distancing myself from reflection on my mortality. If I recognize abstractly that all human beings are mortal, but insist that my death has nothing to do with me now, then I prevent myself from consciously and continually creating who I will be. Heidegger calls this a mark of falling. I am denying my freedom and transcendence if I think of myself as necessarily being who and what I am. Regarding the roles I play and the categories to which I belong as necessarily part of who I am reneges on my capability of transforming who I am. I am kneeling before false necessity if I take my decisions, choices, and actions as being the appropriate, natural, inevitable result of the kind of person that I am. Doing so relegates my future to my unalterable nature. I am clinging to fixity if I accept that I have a fixed, unalterable essence. Doing so denies my transcendence—my freedom and capability of transforming who I am—and overly empowers my facticity—my givenness, aspects of me that cannot be changed, such as my birthdate, biological inheritance, birth parents, and the like. I am settling for chatter if the overwhelming bulk of my conversation with others centers on small talk, babble, gossip, and shop. I am merely squandering time in non-threatening ways. I avoid profound issues such as politics, religion, philosophy, and race because discussing such topics jeopardizes my acceptance by das Man. In sum, das Man, necessity, fixity, fallenness, and chatter are the standard bearers for inauthentic living. For Heidegger, authentic human living focuses on transcendent (free) self-creation in the context of one’s facticity (unalterable context). I must recognize my uniqueness and not identify as a member of a kind or type. I must embrace consciousness of my particular death by heightening my

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awareness of my mortality instead of regarding mortality abstractly as universally pertinent. I must embrace my freedom by concentrating on the decisions, choices, and actions that constitute my life and that help form my self. I must shape my future in context by denying that I am a fixed essence, by accepting the limits of my facticity, and by understanding my transcendent possibilities. I must appreciate the contingency of kinds and types by viewing them as accidental memberships subject to reimagination and revision. Although none of us is entirely authentic or inauthentic, we differ in degree and those differences distinguish the quality of our being. Thus, Heidegger underscores the core principles of existentialist philosophy: refusing to accept current understandings of the self as unalterable; taking responsibility for one’s choices and actions, and the effect they have on the person one is becoming; spurning the seductions of excuses; confronting directly one’s mortality; and rejecting one’s social role as definitive of one’s identity. Perhaps we can sum up his understanding of authenticity by a simple slogan: Face, do not flee from, reality and the truth about the world and one’s self.

The aesthetic person Soren Kierkegaard argued that some human beings live inauthentically by cravenly fleeing from boredom, despair, and the burden of selfcreation. Continually pursuing more intense pleasures, such aesthetic people are doomed to collapse back into boredom and despair. Living in the present can, at best, provide only a partial attitude toward life. By never forging bonds, by weakly committing to projects, and by making only transitory choices, aesthetic people are spectators of the world and fail to define their own lives sharply. Their chosen end is their own beginning: vague dissatisfaction, a sense of no remedy, no salvation, a foreboding of nothingness. Again, the primary existential values are authenticity and intensity. Embracing a tragic sense of life; reaffirming the beauty of life while honestly facing its horrors; recognizing that suffering and anguish are required for fully human life; accepting our freedom and taking complete responsibility for our choices and actions; distancing ourselves from the petty fears and hopes of the faceless masses; heightening our consciousness of the human condition and of our own mortality; and bestowing our energies and enthusiasms upon the world are all paramount ways of manifesting and sustaining those values.20 Kierkegaard’s aesthetic people lead mainly inauthentic lives because they fail to invest their energies and enthusiasms

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in paramount human projects: taking responsibility for self-creation, and defining identity through commitments and convictions that go beyond the pursuit of transitory satisfactions. However, the connection between existential authenticity and moral virtue is tenuous. Leading an authentic life is an entirely formal requirement of the good life that instructs us how to make choices and the conditions under which we should act, but says nothing about the substance of those choices and actions. Being a committed Nazi, a corrupt businessperson, or a hit man for organized crime are possibilities not excluded by the formal requirements of existential authenticity. Thus, existential authenticity is not enough to guarantee either a robustly valuable life or a morally sound path, but it is required for that quest. If Sartre is correct, we too often try to evade the anguish of moral choice, too frequently deny responsibility for our actions, and too readily make excuses for our roles in events. When cultural foundations for epistemological and normative standards collapse, existential authenticity is often the first victim. For Nietzsche, the paramount human task is the ongoing project of crafting a worthy self authentically. The thrust of Nietzsche’s thought is that we can formulate entirely new modes of evaluation that correspond to new, higher forms of life Nietzsche cannot guarantee that human beings will respond energetically to the possibilities open when we accept the loss of a secure foundation for our dearest substantive beliefs and grasp that we must ultimately choose under conditions of radical uncertainty (GS 125). Human reason cannot redeem our predicament. Some of us will shrink back in horror. We will resign ourselves to bitterness and self-pity, and conclude that all is lost. Some of us will refuse to relinquish the fantasy of a world beyond and long for a blissful afterlife. Others of us will accept cosmic meaninglessness and use it as a point of departure for grand creativity. Having “killed” God by developing science and technology, and by creating the social conditions that provide compelling explanations for natural phenomena that in previous ages were explainable only by reference to God, we must now come to grips with the aftershock of our cultural accomplishment. How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves? . . . Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must not we ourselves become gods simply to seem worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed (GS 125).

Nietzsche did not anticipate the possibility of those who would rage against the existing social order without any re-creative vision. They glis-

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ten with the worst attributes of obstreperous two-year-old children: an inflated sense of entitlement leavened by a deficient understanding of civilized life. Such people lack the creativity required to re-imagine and remake their social contexts. Instead, they invoke the loss of secure foundations for our beliefs, choices, and actions as an excuse to ineffectually advance their narrow self-interest. Perhaps we cannot change the human condition or fully remedy the lack of inherent meaning in the world. But Nietzsche challenges us: at least a few of us can loosen the limits of contingency, experience fully the multiplicity of our spirits, forge a coherent unity from our internal conflicts, and learn to overcome ourselves and our institutions. We can turn theoretical insight into practical advantage. The episodic rhythms of the camel, the lion, and the child resonate. The process not only transforms the self, but also creates new values. Thus, Nietzsche anticipates modern existentialism in holding that human beings legislate values through their choices and actions. This process, however, is not merely one of unilateral imposition. That is, the mere desire that something be valuable is insufficient to establish its value. We can read Heidegger, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche and derive a deeper lesson: relish the anxiety of moral choice as required for salutary personal transformation; take responsibility for choices and actions pursuant to them; and bask in the freedom to re-imagine and remake our selves and our social contexts to the extents possible. There are no excuses.

CHAPTER TWO FORGING PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS

Crafting a worthy self requires nurturing robust communal attachments. Friendship and erotic love are the cornerstones of intimate personal relationships. Classical Greek philosophy has much to say about each of these paramount human yearnings. Contemporary philosophy has addressed thoroughly a third issue in personal relationships: what we owe others.

7. Welcome Friendship: Aristotle “Cuando l’amico chiede, non v’è domani.” (“When a friend asks, there is no tomorrow.”) —Italian Proverb

Aristotle insisted that human beings are social animals. A person alone on a desert island might be a beast or a god, but not a human being. If healthy relationships are critical to our well-being then several questions arise: To what types of friendships should we aspire? What are the mutual benefits and dangers of such relationships? What actions reveal and deepen those relationships? How do the intimate bonds we forge help define who we are? Aristotle distinguished three forms of friendship: those based on mutual utility, on pleasure, and on moral goodness (NE 1155a3, 1156a161156b23). Friendships based on utility invoke mutual advantage. Each of the parties gains from the association and those gains are the grounds of the personal connection. Aristotle argued that such friendships are too thin and sprout several flaws. First, these friendships are ephemeral: the personal connection ends as soon as either party is no longer useful to the other. Second, these friendships support feckless relationships: the parties typically spend relatively little time together and the time they do spend is predicated on the ulterior motive of gain. Third, these friendships do not automatically make the parties better human beings: material gains and

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advances in status or occupational prestige may even impair our characters and loosen our link to moral virtue. Friendships based on pleasure suffer similar defects. Pleasure is based on shifting feelings and tastes. Once the preferences of one party change significantly, the friendship ends. Affection evaporates as soon as one person finds greater or different pleasure elsewhere. Such friendships, then, are always hostage to trade-ups: If greater pleasure can be found with person X than with person Y, and if maximizing my pleasure is the focus of my relationships, then my time is spent more wisely with X. My past connection and mutually satisfying relationship with Y translate into no special consideration. Worse, friendships based on mutual pleasure typically center on accidental or contingent features of people—such as age, physical beauty, wit, and charm—instead of essential features that make us who we are. Aristotle’s critiques of friendships based on utility and pleasure reveal what he desires most in personal relationships: permanence; mutual concern for the other as a person; moral improvement based on reciprocity; and mutual affection flowing from the perceived value of the other. Only friendships based on moral goodness embody these dimensions. For Aristotle, the deepest friendships occur between morally upright people. A friend should desire the good for the other for the friend’s sake and not from expectation of personal advantage. Only people who are morally good and similar in their goodness can attain genuine friendship. The parties share affection for who the other is—in terms of content of character—not for accidental qualities (such as physical appearance, status, materially holdings). Such friendships will persist as long as both parties remain morally good, as long as each is worthy of genuine friendship. Because moral goodness, although not automatically permanent, is more enduring than mere utility and pleasure, these friendships are more likely to continue through time. Friendship centered on moral virtue nurtures a praiseworthy relationship between whole persons. For Aristotle, morally excellent people relate to a friend in a fashion similar to how they relate to themselves. A friend is a mirror in which to see oneself. We hold our friends in high esteem for their own sakes, not just for advantages or pleasures we may gain from the relationships. Through friendship we amplify moral virtue; we develop and extend our concern; and care beyond ourselves. Friends enlarge their shared idea of the good and pursue it through common projects that fortify community life. Friends influence and reinforce each other’s zeal for moral rectitude. Aristotle summarizes five dimensions of deep, complete friendship: If I am your friend, I wish and do the good for you, for your sake; I wish that

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you live, for your sake; I spend time with you; I make choices similar to yours; and I share your joys and sufferings (NE 1166a1-1166a9). For Aristotle, these five dimensions are akin to a virtuous person’s self-perception. A good person wants to flourish, desires his or her survival, enjoys solitude at times, controls decisions, and finds joy and suffering where appropriate. Aristotle views friendship as flowing from self-love. My friend is at bottom another me, or a person quite close to another me.

Understanding Aristotelian friendship At first blush, Aristotle appears to miss the mark. Aren’t many worthy friendships generated by people who are radically different in temperament and personality? Don’t friends often make strikingly different life choices without impairing their relationship? Are we truly seeking a twin in friendship? Or do we sometimes bond with others who exude qualities we lack? My questions are all rhetorical. The answers seem to deal a lethal blow to Aristotle’s depiction of genuine friendship. But Aristotle would remind us of the crucial role of moral virtue. The relevant focus of his five dimensions is the moral good. I am like my friend in that critical respect. We make similar moral choices and our relationship supports our growth in ways that make us seem more alike in that pivotal way. Surely, we still make numerous different life choices not in the moral sphere. You continue to gush over fried baloney and onion sandwiches, while I prefer green pepper and eggs. You dress in basic black while I am adorned in Caravaggio red. You root for the Boston Red Sox while I cheer for the New York Yankees. You are extroverted and spontaneous, while I am introverted and reflective. You revel in urban life while I am drawn to small communities. For Aristotle, such choices and fashions of expression are trivial and flow from accidental features of who we are. Despite these differences and countless others, my friend and I stand together as seekers of the moral good, as pursuers of the righteous character that structures who we are. Granted, Aristotle’s depiction does not define what “friendship” must be. Nor does the inclusion of friendships of pleasure and utility complete that task. Friendships come in additional forms and emerge for different reasons than those sketched by Aristotle. He, though, would insist that the deepest, most genuine, most worthy friendships are those centered on sustaining and refining moral character. Self-love and affection for others should be linked to a correct perception of the moral good. Genuine friendship of the highest quality, then, is uncommon for at least two reasons. First, relatively few people embody the requisite moral

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quality. Second, the enterprise of friendship requires considerable time, shared commitments, and joint activities. For Aristotle, friendship, like erotic love, is an inherently discriminatory notion. I cannot be a friend, in the deepest sense, to everyone even if I was so inclined and even if everyone was morally good. I would still not have enough time and I could not expend enough effort to pursue the common commitments and joint activities that genuine friendship demands. Although Aristotle does not discuss the topic, this underscores why trading-up is misplaced in genuine friendship. While I may perceive, accurately, that a stranger possesses a higher degree of moral virtue than my friend, my past connection and mutually satisfying relationship exudes currency. My friend and I are not at a lontananza (distance), but forge a shared identity. Our relationship, if profound enough, entails that my interests are not experienced as fully apart from my friend’s interests and vice versa. Relationships, of course, vary in intensity and depth, but all genuine Aristotelian friendships share this element. Accordingly, I would not trade-up easily because my current friend and I share a relationship that has valuable ramifications for who I am. I would recognize the transition costs—time, energy, uncertainty, changes to my self-image—of substituting the stranger for my current friend. I would also understand that even if the stranger bears more goodness than my friend, the stranger cannot exemplify that goodness in the same way as my friend. The moral virtue of my friend and that of the stranger will differ qualitatively in the particular ways they are manifested. Just as the stranger may be more physically beautiful than my friend, the stranger does not have more of my friend’s beauty. The unique way my friend embodies and expresses beauty may be more appealing to me than the way the stranger expresses his or her admittedly greater physical beauty. Finally, the historical relationship friends have shared has special significance that should not be dismissed. Friends form a union or federation that is not defined merely by adding the interests of the parties together. In friendship, like in well-functioning marriages, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. The bond or union or federation that friends nurture transforms the parties. The historical relationship that chronicles that development bears independent value in a way similar to the value produced by positive family relationships. Shared memories, gratitude, reciprocal selfmaking, and a sense of belonging make trading-up in friendship problematic. Where trading-up does seem to happen easily we can legitimately call into question whether a salutary, deep friendship was present. I do not suggest that we should nurture only one friendship. Clearly, most of us have several friends of varying closeness and contact. We have

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even more acquaintances who provide a host of mutually beneficial interactions. Often, instead of facing a choice of trading-up—discarding our current friend for another person—we can simply add to our list in a way that is precluded in romantic love. Still, practicalities limit the number of close friends with whom we can share deep relationships. Even so, our choice of friends is limited by circumstances of geography, time, economics, culture, and the like. Our social context profoundly affects whom we meet and what activities we undertake. But the same can be said about our choices of spouse, career, and almost all else. Few of our most important choices are limitless. Some readers will find the joint identity principle I am urging troublesome. They will screech that my standard of friendship is too high as it requires a loss of individual autonomy. Once we talk of extended or shared identity, we seem to infringe on an individual’s freedom of choice and independence. My choices, projects, and actions are no longer mine, they are ours. Does this not demand concessions of the individual’s will? The short answer is “yes, but why the surprise?” Every intimate relationship has that consequence. Can we coherently conjure, say, romantic love where each spouse retains full, individual autonomy? Living together, sharing a life, pooling material resources, planning for the future require shared decision-making, reciprocity, and mutuality. To believe that full independence can be retained is fatuous. Granted, friendships come in more shadings and forms than Aristotle catalogued. But the deepest versions of friendship—the ones that transform our characters the most—are akin to loves. Why should we shrink back in horror when we find that our independence is no longer sacrosanct? A world of strangers may be a world of complete independence for individuals, a community of friends is not. We care about our friends, at least in part, because we perceive that they bear excellences or admirable qualities. We could be mistaken in that assessment, of course. Our evaluations are not infallible, our perceptions are not flawless. Once we realize our error, the incipient friendship may end. But the ground of our initial attraction is the value we think the other possesses.

Concerns A critic would rejoin, however, that making the perceived value of the other the ground of friendship is problematic. First, our real focus seems to be on that value, wherever it may reside, and not on a particular person. Human beings are not merely repositories of value, nor does value alone

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define who we are. We have other qualities—beyond our glorious value— that are neutral in terms of value or that are imperfections or disvalues. To focus only on the other’s value is to befriend her for only a part of her personhood. Second, to ground friendship only in the other’s current perceived value is to freeze the other in time. We all change, grow, and regress. To rivet a friendship in the current image of the other is to deny inevitable change. Again, such a friendship is not directed at a whole person but at a certain value which we now think we have found in the other. These criticisms are difficult, but not impossible, to answer. To establish a friendship of whole persons, our critic is correct: we must appreciate more than the current perceived value of each other. Each of us is a compendium of qualities, not all admirable, wrapped together by our unique way of embodying and expressing those qualities, seasoned by hosts of possibilities (potential qualities that we can develop into actualities). By considering the other person’s qualities beyond their perceived value, we parry the charge that we are drawn only to value not whole people. By attending to the other idealized possibilities, we block the charge that friendship wrongly freezes the other in the present. Friends affect each other’s choices, actions, and personal development. They do not simply take the other as a fixed, permanent character. Friendships are intimate relationships of varying degrees, typically less so than romantic loves and more so than polite acquaintanceships. One of the functions of friendship is to control access to ourselves and to regulate our privacy. Intimacy is mutually nurtured in several ways: through privileged self-disclosure, participation in shared projects, discerning and advancing each other’s best interests, and having a roughly similar system of values. Bonds of trust, far beyond the level we enjoy with strangers, flow from the heightened mutual vulnerability distinguishing deep friendships. I disclose information about myself to my friends that I keep shrouded from the general public. In so doing, I regulate my privacy—permitting more access to those whom I choose—and both acknowledge and reinforce the bonds of trust between my friends and me. By participating in shared projects, friends reveal and sustain the projects of their most profound concern. Friends share activities at least partly for the sake of sharing them. Friends often strive to advance each other’s interests. I can advance my friend’s interests only after appraising what my friend’s best interests are. Throughout all these processes, the values of the parties are paramount. Sometimes friends come to their relationship with roughly similar values. Sometimes they develop roughly similar values as a consequence of their relationship and shared activities. In any case, friends mu-

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tually influence each other’s values in proportion to the closeness of the relationship. I may be drawn to or try out a new value or project simply because my friend already embodies the value or pursues the project. But my initial attraction need not translate into final acceptance of the value or project into my life scheme. We should recognize a distinction between what motivates my desire to try out a new project or examine a new value—I pursue them just because they rivet my friend’s concern—and the grounds upon which I will decide whether to adopt the value or project as my own. My friend’s values and projects never fully define mine. I must make a relatively independent assessment of the new value or project at some point.

The process of friendship Friendship is also an exercise in self-making in proportion to the closeness of the relationship. We need others to help understand and define ourselves. Those closest to us play a disproportionately strong role. The annoying parental warning—“Be careful who your friends are, do not associate with the wrong crowd”—creases the mark squarely. Friends influence the people we are becoming. Friendship is, accordingly, a process, not a fixed condition. It begins in lack and is grounded in power. But the grandeur of friendship is that it is not a commodity: it cannot be bought or sold, yet it isn’t costless. Friendship struggles to overcome its internal paradoxes of consolation and growth, dependency and freedom. The uniqueness and specialness of the friends—not in terms of their facility in guiding the mutual quest for individual perfection—forms the core of the relationship. Friendship is a mysterious mixture of choice and discovery that changes our perception of the world without actually changing the world. Friendship is transformative but not redemptive. But, mostly, it is an acknowledgment of bonds not fully chosen. Friendship cannot be an arm’s-length, mutual aid exercise in individualism. Friends cannot be creators at a lontananza. No, friendship widens our subjectivity and creates a new identity that immediately embodies its own unrealized ideals. And the unrealized ideal possibilities of friendsbound are never merely the sum of the unrealized ideal possibilities embodied by the two individuals. The friendship is not two minds thinking or valuing as one. Even the closest of friends, like the most committed lovers, must keep a reasonable amount of independence.

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Friendship is also dangerous. Other than our spouse or a blood relative, no one can betray us more hurtfully or thoroughly than a close friend. Any time we heighten our vulnerability by revealing special information about ourselves, sharing intimate activities, forging bonds of trust, and relying upon the good will of others, we not only enjoy the fruits of positive selfmaking but also risk treachery. My friends know more about me, have shared and helped to shape my values, and benefit from my trust. They are in a better position than the general public to advance my best interests but also to set back my deepest aspirations. Are the risks worth the value of friendship? Friendships increase our flow experiences by energizing our efforts in the projects at hand. Shared activities and commitments are also necessary for moral and intellectual growth. Friends, following Aristotle, help us accurately evaluate the quality and meaningfulness of our lives. The sense of belonging and intimate validation friendships produce soften our fears that we are alone and powerless. Because we are social animals friendships are valuable for their own sake, not just for benefits directly derived from the relationships. One test of our relationships is whether we are better in the presence of our friends or close associates than we are in their absence. Contra Aristotle, “better” need not translate to “superior in moral goodness.” That our greatest value is measured by our moral dispositions and actions may be true, but human worth is gauged by several other dimensions as well: our connection to cognitive, aesthetic, scientific, social, even athletic value. Our fruitful relationships with friends should increase our value in one or more of these dimensions. Another test of our relationships is whether we are sometimes willing to advance the interests of our friends or teammates when doing so does not advance—and may even hinder—our own interests. This is, admittedly, a tough standard. I once unveiled this idea to a colleague. She was too polite to tell me that she thought I was crazy, but her involuntary facial reaction spoke volumes. She was convinced that friendship surely involved caring about others, wishing them well for their own sakes, providing comfort in troubled times, sharing joys in triumphant moments, and the like. But to ask that we sometimes put the interests of friends above those of our own struck her as tyrannical. I held my ground. To me, the most penetrating relationships, the ones most implicated in transforming the self, must accept this stringent test. As intense and meaningful as friendships can be, for most of us our most significant relationships center on erotic love. Plato’s ancient insights about love have resonated since the days he chronicled them.

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8. Nurture Love: Plato “To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three-parts dead.” ʊBertrand Russell

Erotic love is in some sense friendship amplified exponentially. In addition, erotic love tends toward exclusivity in a way that friendships do not. As a result, erotic love embodies substantially greater power to constitute the self than does a friendship. But what do our loves reveal about who we are? What attracts us to this rather than that lover? What is it the object and basis of our love? Is erotic love rational or is it emotionally obsessive? Is whom we love purely a matter of choice or are aspects of discovery involved?

The Symposium Plato’s most evocative and beautifully imaginative dialogue is The Symposium.1 Symposia in ancient Greece were all-male, after-dinner parties hosted by aristocrats. Focused on intellectual matters, these parties invariably offered sexual opportunities as young women and men— courtesans and musicians—served the guests. The importance of Plato’s dialogue is undeniable. The Symposium includes moving speeches about the god, Eros, that reflect how educated Athenians understood love. Strikingly, all of these speeches can be interpreted to contain messages about love that glisten with contemporary relevance. Moreover, each report on love mirrors the nature of its speaker’s soul. Plato’s overall lesson resonates: Each of us is in large measure constituted by whom and what we love. The things we value and the people with whom we are intimate reflect and sustain our characters. Phaedrus is a modest, handsome young man who is the beloved of Eryximachus, a medical doctor. He extols Eros for giving human beings their greatest gift. For him, love centers on physical, homosexual relationships. Homosexual lovers fight more courageously than is typical because they do not want to dishonor themselves in the perception of their beloved. Eros, thus, nurtures certain virtues in the lover. Excellence resides in the lover, not the beloved; but the beloved has higher status than the lover because the beloved is pursued. In general, the lover’s pursuit of the beloved affirms the higher status of the beloved (S 178a-180b). Phaedrus demonstrates the meagerness of his soul through his theory of love. First, his understanding of love is narrow and one-sided. He speaks of lovers and those beloved, not of mutuality and reciprocity. Sec-

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ond, his notion of love is mainly or solely physical and focuses on the relative statuses of the parties. Third, he locates the value of love in the purely instrumental: how lovers are emboldened in battle lest they shame themselves in the eyes of the beloved; how the beloved gains social status through being an object of desire. Phaedrus shows little or no awareness of how intimate relationships extend our metaphysical boundaries or why communal bonds are critical for human flourishing. Still, we can tease out of Phaedrus’s speech a contemporary lesson: Genuine, worthy love will elevate the parties. In crucial respects, the parties in a loving relationship should be better human beings than they would otherwise have been. If parties claiming to be in love are not elevated, then they either are not in love at all or their version of love corrupts their spirits and is thereby unworthy. Thus Phaedrus highlights a major concern about the pairing of two lovers. Will they bring out the best in one another? Will they elicit each other’s ideal possibilities or will they micromanage their characters counterproductively? Will they nurture the other’s independence and free spirit or will they unwittingly drain each other of transcendent trajectory? The next speaker is Pausanias, longtime lover of the poet, Agathon. Pausanias is a pupil of the sophist, Prodicus. Pausanias speaks of base, earthly loves and glorious, celestial loves. Base loves center on physical, sexual relations that are heterosexual or homosexual involving young boys. Women in Athens did not receive formal education so some male aristocrats were convinced that heterosexual relations could be grounded only in the pursuit of physical pleasure. Likewise, young boys were too immature spiritually and mentally to inspire anything other than physical lust. For Pausanias, physical lust was an unworthy motivation. Inspired by a profound commitment to dualism, Pausanias was convinced that the mind or soul was the locus of personal identity and thus the higher part of human beings. Glorious, celestial loves concentrate on nurturing the fulfillment of our higher desires. Cultivating excellent character—centering concern on the soul and intellect—is the identifying mark of the best loves. The beloved, invariably a young man (not a young boy), sexually gratifies the lover, who reciprocates by teaching his beloved how to acquire virtue. Undoubtedly trying to advance his own self-interest with Agathon, Pausanias adds that the beloved should grant any sexual gratification requested by the lover (Are you listening, Agathon?) so that in return the beloved may learn more about virtue (S 180c-185c). Pausanias advances our understanding of love by adding the notions of reciprocity and spiritual refinement to the earlier account. Although his idea of the substance of reciprocity is self-serving and mirrors the aspira-

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tions of his social situation, Pausanias reminds us that the merely physical is an inadequate basis for love: Genuine love must be reciprocal and it must energize our most valuable desires and capabilities. Again, the paramount questions: Will the two lovers be equal partners in the joint project of mutual self-improvement? Or will the deficiencies in their respective characters post insurmountable obstacles to reciprocity and mutuality? The third speaker is Eryximachus, a medical doctor and the lover of Phaedrus. Plato was not fond of medical practitioners. He was convinced that those who diagnosed and tended to only the physical would lack understanding of the spiritual and intellectual. Moreover, medical doctors typically overestimated their intellectual talents. Predictably, Eryximachus seems overly self-important and smug. His theory of love emphasizes the harmony of opposites within individuals and the world. Genuine love facilitates virtue, self-restraint, moral action, and internal harmony. Ersatz love encourages self-indulgence and self-destruction. Genuine love nurtures a healthy body, while ersatz love results in sickness. The contemporary lesson: Genuine, worthy love moderates internal conflict and promotes health (S 186a-188e). Lacking a refined conception of the mind-body connection, Eryximachus stresses the physical results of worthy loves. But his account is simplistic and exudes limited explanatory power. Why do genuine loves produce such effects? Is health really just a matter of reconciling opposites? Could not a valuable love exacerbate internal conflict but thereby promote intellectual and moral growth? Can a genuine harmony be attained by lovers? Or will facile compromise thinly veil seething incompatibility? At its best, love promotes high creativity and personal growth by transforming the inner conflicts of the parties to practical advantage. The comedian, Aristophanes, is next on the docket. Historically, Aristophanes had caricatured Plato’s mentor, Socrates, in several of his plays. Surprisingly, Plato allows Aristophanes to take the discussion in a more sophisticated direction. The comedian invokes an ancient allegory in order to illustrate truths about love. At an early point in our existence, human beings were colossal creatures. We each had 4 legs, 4 arms, 2 heads, with double the strength and intelligence we now embody. Unfortunately, we were also arrogant and our hubris upset Zeus. To once and forever put us in our place, Zeus severed us in half, which produced the relatively feeble creatures we now are. As a result, each of us is now searching for our missing half. For Aristophanes, the point of the allegory is that love is the pursuit of completeness. Instead of following the understandings of the

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prior speakers, the comedian moves away from instrumental views of love to the presumed nature of love, its animating obsession for wholeness (S 189c-193e). However, the major problem in this account is evident: Our search is ill-fated. If we are literally searching for the other half that will make us whole then our chances of success are, in a practical sense, zero. To form literally two hearts beating as one is impossible. However zealously we pursue love in the name of attaining unity, we must remain separate. For Aristophanes, love is an exercise in self-transformation, but one doomed to failure. Love is an admission of profound vulnerability, but its results cannot match its aspirations. Still, Aristophanes points us the way to derive a host of modern lessons about love. First, genuine, worthy love is a paradox—it aspires to completeness but cannot attain it. Second, the pursuit of love is both a necessary and frustrating human endeavor. Third, the quest for perfection of the human spirit is impossible; at best, we can hope only to amplify satisfactorily our identities and mollify the more terrifying aspects of the human condition. Fourth, pursuing love both exposes and exacerbates our vulnerability. Fifth, instead of completeness, in pursuing love we might well seek (in my terminology) an enhanced sense of community: in love we enhance self-discovery, find in others a way to expand our subjectivities, and, if we are fortunate, forge connections with another person whom we come to regard as unique and irreplaceable. Aristophanes understands keenly that the pursuit of love has its source in a need and lack that can never be fulfilled once and forever. Yet, it is in the pursuit of love that we manifest what is most human about us. Lovers must understand that their union cannot be a fixed serenity or final completion. Their love is an ongoing negotiation of spirit, body, and mind that must not be taken for granted. The poet, Agathon, fresh off a stirring victory in a verse competition, is the next speaker. The beloved of Pausanias and a student of the sophist, Gorgias, Agathon praises the qualities of the god, Eros. Coincidentally, all of the attributes that Agathon extols are traits that he is convinced he embodies: youth, fluidity, beauty, delicacy, and utter magnetism. As always, Plato is suspicious of poets whom he regards as mere imitators of an inferior reality. Agathon’s apparent encomium to Eros is in fact a narcissistic ode to himself. He also praises the deeds of Eros: moderate and fair dealing, courageous and wise actions. So beautiful is Eros that he bestows attractiveness and goodness upon others (S 194e-197e). The message is unsubtle: the other aristocrats at the symposium are elevated simply by basking in Agathon’s presence. By exalting fixed attrib-

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utes, Agathon suggests that love seeks final serenity—a perfected individual who is self-sufficient. As such, Agathon’s speech is a step backward in our progression of understanding. Instead of recognizing that love begins in lack and in need, Agathon imagines that the triumph of love is in selfsufficiency. Do the best among us love only ourselves? Can love really attain a set of fixed, perfecting properties? Or is Agathon’s soul deluded and arrogant? Agathon’s soliloquy reminds us that lovers must guard against the allure of Agathon’s own intoxicating rhetoric and self-image. Socrates then offers an exquisite mystical vision of love that he claims to have learned from the priestess, Diotima. Contra Agathon, love is not a fixed, glorious state or a static condition. Love demands ongoing change and adaptation; it is a process. Love is a desire; we desire that which we do not have or that which we have insufficiently; if love is the desire for beauty then love cannot be beauty. Indeed, love is a process by which we reveal and get closer to our deepest yearnings. We begin by recognizing and appreciating the beauty of a particular object or person in the world. This instance of physical beauty allows us to abstract and recognize all physical beauty; it permits us to go beyond the particular to the general. We then come to recognize and appreciate the beauty of the soul and spiritual beauty in general. We continue by recognizing the beauty of just laws, social institutions, and salutary customs and activities. We rise to the appreciation of the beauty of math, science, and knowledge in general. Finally, we may glimpse the most profound source of our yearning: a vision of Absolute Beauty, the Form of Beauty, Beauty as such (S 199c212c). As we climb Socrates’s ladder of love—which is a journey toward higher degrees of reality, truth, and knowledge—we travel from the derivative reality of immediate experience to the foundational Reality in a timeless realm. Socrates assumes that if we love an object or person we do so for a reason and it is that reason that is the deepest object of our love. If I love Marcia because she is beautiful and good, then Beauty and Goodness are the true objects of my love, not any particular instance of beauty and goodness. Accordingly, loving particular people and things in the world directs me to the most fundamental source of my yearning: to attain my destiny in the eternal world of Forms. That is, genuine human fulfillment is impossible in this world; only in a disembodied condition can the human soul reunite with Absolute Truth, Absolute Beauty, and Absolute Goodness. The actual beloved in an intimate relationship is Truth, Beauty, and Goodness as such. Socrates unravels the paradox of love so brilliantly articulated by Aristophanes—that our deepest desires in pursuing love are never completely fulfilled, however fervently we undertake the quest. Soc-

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rates answers that because our true desire is for reunification with Forms in a higher realm, any earthly love will point us in that direction, but fall short of fulfilling our most profound aim. Hence, we will simultaneously be elevated yet be somewhat unfulfilled by even the most genuine earthly loves. We will always yearn for more. Under the Socrates-Diotima rendering, love is a process through which we express and strive mightily to fulfill our longing for eternity and the divine. The pursuit of love by human beings is as inevitable as it is disappointing. Socrates does not appear to be advising us to dismiss interpersonal love in deference to the philosophical love of Forms that he sketches. Interpersonal love is instrumentally valuable to our quest for eternal fulfillment in the transcendental realm. But is that the only value of interpersonal love? To serve as an energizing marker for or signpost to what we truly desire? If so, Socrates, at best, can tell us why we love, but he does not help us understand whom to love. Surely, we might pursue the person whom we were convinced best exemplified the general attributes which we allegedly desire—the best embodiment of truth, beauty, and goodness. But that suggests that we might legitimately seek to “trade up.” If Marcia is a grand exemplifier of truth, beauty, and goodness, but later I meet Linda who exhibits those traits even more gloriously, should I then seek Linda’s love and cast Marcia aside? If this is a consequence of Socrates’s position then he loses an indispensable aspect of salutary, interpersonal love—how the other person comes to be viewed as unique and irreplaceable even when we recognize that someone else possesses more excellences. In healthy loves we do not seek to trade up as a strategy for deeper fulfillment. On the other hand, Socrates might advise us that it is not necessary to identify and court the person we are convinced is the best exemplifier of the excellences for which we allegedly pine. If so, the problem of trading up evaporates. But, still, we seek guidance about whom we should love. Will any person whom we regard as somewhat beautiful, good, and true be suitable? Should the degree of beauty, goodness, and truth embodied by particular persons have any bearing on our selection? My point is that Socrates’s underlying assumptions—that the reason we love is the genuine object of our love; that we seek the purest form of that object; and that love is therefore of excellent properties and attributes—reduce interpersonal love to a passionate, intellectual exercise. Our passion in love is not really directed toward another concrete person, but, instead, is centered on philosophical abstractions that allegedly subsist in a transcendental realm accessible to us only after we die. For Socrates, the

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world of everyday experience is never enough and earthly loves are merely instrumentally valuable. In the Platonic dialogues in which Socrates is the main character he always gets the last word; except in The Symposium. An uninvited guest, the notorious Alcibiades, staggers in off the street. Drunk and loud, he offers the final depiction of the nature of love. He begins by alternately praising and berating Socrates. Physically ugly and emotionally indifferent to Alcibiades’s romantic overtures, Socrates is an enigma. Alcibiades credits Socrates as a brave soldier who could endure hardships uncommonly well. Having ignored bodily pleasures, Socrates was less likely to feel physical pain acutely. He had distanced himself from the bodily sensations in order to fulfill his spiritual mission of philosophical contemplation and purity of the soul. Yet, Alcibiades, who was desired by so many, remained obsessed with Socrates. As Alcibiades deepens his account and underscores his attraction to Socrates, an alternate understanding of the nature of love emerges (S 213e-223a). In Alcibiades’s account, love is not directed to abstract properties and perceived excellences taken to their highest forms. In Alcibiades’s eyes, Socrates’s view of love is inaccurate. Instead, love centers on particular, concrete people. Often irrational and even obsessive, love is a specific relationship, not simply a longing for the eternal. Never conducted properly at a distance, love requires a merger of identities. Aristophanes suggested that love is unstable; it both exposes and heightens our vulnerability. Socrates has rejected Alcibiades’s romantic overtures, yet Alcibiades remains smitten. For Alcibiades, love is thoroughly temporal and it focuses on the uniqueness of the other person. Genuine love is not fungible—we cannot substitute one person’s praiseworthy properties for another person’s praiseworthy properties. Instead of pointing us toward the eternal and to a transcendental realm, love immerses us fully in the specific, nonduplicable characteristics of a particular person. Accordingly, that Linda embodies more beauty, goodness, and truth than does Marcia cannot imply that I should try to trade up. Linda cannot duplicate Marcia’s unique way of expressing those excellences. Marcia’s unique way of exemplifying quite common excellences is critical to our love. Moreover, we have a relationship that defines a shared identity. Where that relationship is healthy, we lack incentive to sever our bonds and incur painful transition costs to our sense of self. The dialogue ends unresolved. The two concluding theories of love compete for our allegiance. Socrates offers a philosophical love of abstraction linked to virtue and knowledge. His view resonates today with religious believers who understand earthly love as preparation for what we

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most deeply seek: reunification with God. Alcibiades suggests an utterly earth-bound love that centers on concrete, particular people—a love that is often irrational, even obsessive. Such love is self-sustaining and does not point beyond itself. Whereas the Socratic view speaks to our urges to go beyond ourselves, to transcend our humanness and climb toward the divine, the view of Alcibiades reminds us that, for better or worse, we are immersed completely in this world. Is there a difference in The Symposium between what the character Socrates argues and what Plato believes? Might Plato be revealing his misgivings about the metaphysical structure of the Forms and the nature of the transcendental realm? Might Plato be using Alcibiades as his mouthpiece to call into question some of Plato’s earlier philosophical commitments? The possibilities suggested by such questions are uncommonly interesting but go beyond the scope of our discussion of erotic love.

Poetry, madness, and love In another dialogue, Phaedrus, Plato uses the character Socrates to unveil a different notion of love.2 In several of his dialogues, Plato celebrates reason, self-sufficiency, and the superior values of the intellect, while denigrating passion and poetry. Surprisingly, in the Phaedrus, Socrates delivers two speeches, the last of which describes philosophy informed by passion and personal love. Certain kinds of passion are depicted as necessary for deep insight and the development of worthy character. The madness surrounding love is a gift from the gods that facilitates happiness (PH 244a-249c). Most important, intimate human relationships are critical to the good life. The most profound philosophy requires poetry and passion. Passions that are inspired by the gods, in contrast to those arising from mental defect or uncontrolled desire, bestow the gifts of prophecy, poetry and love. The proper sort of madness (passion), then, is required for acute insight. Erotic relationships between particular people aid the mutual quest for self-perfection. Each lover begins to perceive his or her own spark of the divine reflected in the gaze of the other (PH 249c-256c). Such righteous madness contrasts with calculation of instrumental benefits: the lover does not seek a mate in order to extract mutual advantage—although in salutary, erotic relationships each party gains much. Here Plato perceives the self-sufficient and self-possessed person as embodying a narrow, deficient soul. The passions motivate robust action and the quest for the good; they respond to beauty and enhance understanding; and they inspire glorious self-transformation. Contra later Stoic doctrine, to starve our passions

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and underplay our emotions is to emaciate our characters and to suffocate our wills. The result will obscure our search for the good. In this dialogue, to love another person is not merely to seek a means to scale Diotima’s ladder of love. Instead, to love another concrete individual is to be intoxicated with that person’s character, and with mutual memories and shared aspirations. Here love is more than preoccupation with perceived excellences that the other person may well lose in the future. Passion fuels appreciation of the other for the person’s own sake, not simply as a means to the world of Absolutes. Responding to another person passionately unifies the otherwise conflicting parts of the soul. While erotic love sustains our yearning for a return to the transcendent world of Absolutes that is not its only function. In the Phaedrus, lovers of beauty and followers of Muses are not only compatible with but essential for the philosophical journey (PH 248d-249a). Most strikingly, Socrates distances himself from a view of passion that is found in other Platonic dialogues. No longer does he view erotic impulses as blind, destructive forces that incapacitate human reason; as separate from cognition and inherently excessive; and as intruders on intellectual purity and clarity. In the Phaedrus, Socrates describes different forms of passion, some of which animate our souls and refine our understanding. In the Symposium, we were left with a choice of understanding love as either Alcibiades’s obsessive, unexplainable madness for another person or Socrates-Diotima’s portrayal of earthly love as an instrument for the soul’s intellectual ascension to direct apprehension of the highest Good. In the Phaedrus, we are presented a fuller alternative: a vision of mature love that elevates both parties, that is defined by passion, and that focuses on relationships between concrete individuals that are valued for their own sake. To attain the good, the true, and the beautiful requires the complexities of the passionate life. No longer is abstracting from the particularities of our world enough to ascend to the divine. A touch of erotic madness is required for personal depth and theoretical insight. In this dialogue, Plato combines Socrates’ quest for the transcendent and Alcibiadess’ passionate yearning for another person in all of his or her concreteness. Readers are no longer offered a stark choice between alternate renderings of erotic love, but are, instead, invited to embrace an alluring synthesis. In any event, The Symposium and Phaedrus challenge us to test the vitality of our own characters, our own souls, by assessing what and whom we love.

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9. Examine What We Owe Others: Peter Singer “Not only is the self entwined in society; it owes society its existence in the most literal sense” — Theodor Adorno

The vast majority of other human beings with whom we share the planet are neither lovers nor friends nor acquaintances. What consideration, if, any, do we owe strangers? We are well aware of the extent of suffering caused by poverty, famine, and political oppression. Even if we are not responsible for such pain are we nevertheless obligated to help relieve it? If so, why are we obligated and to what degree are we required to expend our resources, time, and efforts to alleviate it? The most influential contemporary applied ethicist, Australian Peter Singer (1946- ), argues that we are morally obligated to do much more for others, even strangers, than conventional practices admit. He begins from an observation from nineteenth-century philosopher Henry Sidgwick that “The good of any one individual is of no more importance, from the point of view (if I may say so) of the Universe than the good of any other.”3 That is, from the vantage point of the cosmos—the external perspective of an indifferent observer or of Nature itself or a deity that values all human creatures equally—the importance of an interest or need does not depend on who embodies it.

Singer’s argument First enunciated in an article called, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,”4 Singer’s argument can be summarized as follows: 1. Suffering and death resulting from inadequate food, shelter, and medical care are bad events. 2. If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally to do it. 3. Millions of human beings are in fact suffering and dying from inadequate food, shelter, and medical care. 4. Millions of human beings in affluent countries have it within their power to prevent much of this suffering and dying without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance. Therefore, millions of human beings in affluent countries ought, morally, to prevent those sufferings and deaths.

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Singer takes his first premise to be uncontroversial: that suffering and death arising from lacking basic necessities are bad events is unlikely to be contested seriously. He explains his second premise: “By ‘without sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance’ I mean without causing anything else comparably bad to happen, or doing something that is wrong in itself, or failing to promote some moral good, comparable in significance to the bad thing that we can prevent.”5Although he is writing in the context of contributing to famine relief, he illustrates his principle by a Good Samaritan-type example: if a person is strolling past a shallow pond and sees a child drowning, who he might rescue easily at only the sacrifice of getting his clothes muddy, he ought, morally, to save the child. In that case, the rescuer would not be sacrificing anything morally significant, much less be sacrificing something of comparable moral importance. The force of Singer’s “ought” judgment is one of moral obligation: “‘I have an obligation to’ means no more, and no less, than ‘I ought to.’”6 Thus, on Singer’s view, rescuing the child drowning in the pond and contributing to famine relief, under the circumstances described, are moral imperatives; they are not supererogatory actions—deeds that are good, go beyond the call of moral requirements, and thus are not wrong not to do. His argument does not depend on the proximity of human need. Whereas the Good Samaritan of the Biblical parable came upon a beaten victim and would otherwise have never known of his need, Singer insists that “it makes no moral difference whether the person I can help is a neighbor’s child ten yards from me or a Bengali whose name I shall never know, ten thousand miles away.”7 Human beings today have access to information and communications media unimaginable in Biblical times. Singer implicitly reminds us that these technological advances have moral ramifications for the questions “Who is my neighbor?” and “What do I owe my neighbor?” While physical proximity to people in dire need typically means that it is more likely that we will aid them, for Singer it does not follow that we ought to help them instead of others who live farther away. Physical proximity to people in dire need may well result in our being in a clearer position to determine what must be done and to provide immediate aid—reasons that may well impel us toward helping them first. But physical proximity as such bears no moral significance for Singer. Moreover, Singer’s argument makes no distinction between cases where I am the only person who can supply the required succor and cases where millions are in the same position to help. If I am one of a million bystanders who watch a child drown whom any of us could have easily rescued I am no more or less morally culpable than if I was the only bystander who refused to help. In such cases, moral culpability does not di-

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vide among those who are morally deficient and thereby lessen their blame; instead, moral culpability multiplies and those who are morally deficient, all other things being equal, all bear full moral responsibility for their inaction. But how much are we morally required to sacrifice, in terms of physical risk and monetary disbursements, to alleviate the suffering and deaths of our fellow human beings who are in need? Singer’s first answer to this question is severe: I and everyone else in similar circumstances ought to give as much as possible, that is, at least up to the point at which by giving more one would begin to cause serious suffering for oneself and one’s dependents—perhaps even beyond this point to the point of marginal utility, at which by giving more one would cause oneself and one’s dependents as much suffering as one would prevent [to those in need faraway].8

Singer recognizes the well-known principle of economics that the same amount of additional money will increase a person’s well-being less, the wealthier he or she is: five extra dollars is more significant to a destitute person than to a rich person. Still, Singer struggles with the implications of marginal utility as the standard of moral obligation. He is convinced that even people of good faith will find the standard too demanding. Thus, Singer offers a lower moral standard as a possibility: “we should prevent bad occurrences unless, to do so, we had to sacrifice something morally significant . . . even on this surely undeniable principle a great change in our way of life is required.”9 So his considered view at this point was that the standard of marginal utility remained the most philosophically persuasive principle of distribution, but the more moderate standard—give or risk unless in doing so you must sacrifice something morally significant— would still have revolutionary effects. In a later rendition, Singer softened even the moderate standard. Fearful that both of his previously offered recommendations might be viewed as too strenuous by almost everyone and that people might conclude that if they cannot fulfill their moral requirements they may as well not even bother to try, Singer suspects that “public advocacy of [the standard of marginal utility] is undesirable.”10 We will be better off—if our goal is the reduction of absolute poverty—to advocate publicly a reduced standard that more people will embrace even though the best philosophical argument supports a much higher standard. In that vein, while conceding that any such figure will be arbitrary, Singer concludes that 10% of one’s income is an appropriate amount for those who are relatively affluent.

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[T]hose earning average or above-average incomes in affluent societies, unless they have an unusually large number of dependents or other special needs, ought to give a tenth of their income to reducing absolute poverty.11

Singer recognized the radically counterintuitive implications of his position. He was self-consciously a moral reformer—the core of his project was not to validate but to transform our current moral understandings. Where our moral standards and expectations are increased, he believes that our decisions will improve: rigorous moral arguments can augur welcome changes in moral practices.

The ideal of impartiality What is clear is that Singer’s answer to the question “Who is my neighbor?” is “everyone.”12 Clearly, Singer renounces tribalism, discrimination based on common religion, race, ethnicity, gender, and the like from the outset. He refuses to carve the universe into friends, acquaintances, and strangers—at least for the purposes of determining whose needs should count in our moral calculus. His theoretical answer as to how much is owed my neighbors is as much as I have to the point of marginal utility. His practical answer to that question is I owe my needy neighbors aid as long as rendering assistance does not compel me to sacrifice something morally significant; at the very least, if I am relatively affluent I ought to contribute 10% of my holdings to help reduce absolute poverty. As such, Singer’s position is a contemporary interpretation of the parable of the Good Samaritan with a few modest adjustments. If taken literally, the parable of the Good Samaritan could be construed as calling for radical impartiality. To love my neighbor as myself might imply that I should allocate my resources—money, time, and effort—to others in the same way that I think I should allocate them to myself. Thus, in a forced choice situation, where I could distribute, say, a piece of food to another person or consume it myself, if all other factors are equal, then I should figuratively flip a coin to determine the recipient. That is, as between giving the food to the other person or consuming it myself, I should select the recipient randomly because under the conditions specified my “neighbor” has as much claim to the food as I do. In this regard, Singer provides a secular account of Jesus’ suggestions in the biblical parable of the Good Samaritan. Granted, Jesus was always suspicious of strict, code book understandings of religious and moral law, and Jesus’ description of the Good Samaritan’s actions does not automatically support the literal interpretation I suggest, but that understanding remains a live possibility.13

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In any case, Singer’s theoretical prescription of giving one’s material possessions to stymie world poverty and famine to the point of marginal utility—the level at which by giving more one would cause oneself and one’s dependents as much suffering as one would alleviate for the needy— approximates radical impartiality. Moreover, Singer states explicitly that “we cannot, if we accept the principle of equal consideration of interests, say that doing [a particular] act is better . . . because we are more concerned about Y than we are about X. What the principle is really saying is that an interest is an interest, whoever’s interest it may be.”14 Unlike the biblical love commandment and the parable of the Good Samaritan that interprets it, Singer is not counseling universal love. His ethic is grounded in rationality and the principle of equal consideration of interests. Singer does not address the affection or lack of affection one might have for the people who embody interests and who are in need. The biblical imperative is one of deed and affection, whereas Singer’s ethic is only of deed. That is, Singer does not require that we feel as close emotionally to needy strangers as we do to family and friends. What he concludes—at least when he invokes the standard of marginal utility—is that any difference in affection should not translate into different treatment in terms of allocating our material resources where equal needs are at issue. Moralists who subscribe to the ideal of radical impartiality can point to a distinguished history for support. In the West, we have the biblical injunction to love thy neighbor as thyself as illustrated in the parable of the Good Samaritan. This moral ideal was clearly meant to extend self-love to all other human beings, or at least all those with whom one comes into contact. Taken at its most uncompromising, as I have argued, this injunction commands us to manifest the same degree of concern to others that we lavish upon ourselves. Although it is inartfully crafted—as it holds out the possibility that if one is filled with self-hate or ersatz self-love such dispositions are legitimately transferred to others—it offers a powerful moral aspiration. In the eyes of the Supreme Being we are all equal and none of us merits privilege on the basis of identity alone. Instead, human beings all share claims to equal mutual concern based solely on our humanity. To transfer this notion into the language of affection: love for all humanity must be unconditional and unwavering. But one need not be a fervent subscriber to this strain of JudeoChristianity to find historical support for impartiality. More than four hundred years prior to the birth of Christ, the Chinese sage Mo Tzu counseled a universal human love that did not distinguish between families, friends, and strangers.

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If men were to regard the states of others as they regard their own, then who would raise up his state to attack the state of another? It would be like attacking his own . . . If men were to regard the families of others as they regard their own, then who would raise up his family to overthrow that of another? It would be like overthrowing his own.15

Mo Tzu explicitly advised that we should have as much regard for strangers as for our immediate families, and suggested that until we renounce partiality to immediate families we will be saddled with an incoherent and inferior moral code. When we inquire into the cause of these various harms, what do we find has produced them? . . . They come from hating others and trying to injure them. And when we set out to classify and describe those men who love and benefit others, shall we say that their actions are motivated by partiality or by universality? Surely we must answer, by universality, and it is this universality in their dealings with one another that gives rise to all the great benefits in the world . . . and partiality is the source of all the great harm.16

In fact, on Mo Tzu’s view, duties among family members could only be understood coherently as particular cases of our duties to humanity.17 Thus, to differentiate strongly between the degrees of concern we show to intimates and to strangers undercuts the ground of all morality and fragments social life. Unfortunately, Mo Tzu’s arguments are unpersuasive. He typically assumes that only two alternative ethical outlooks are available: either universal benevolence or a partialism that disdains those outside one’s immediate circle of concern, which is limited to self, immediate family, and, perhaps, close relatives. For example, Because he views his friend in [a partialist way], he will not feed him when he is hungry, clothe him when he is cold, nourish him when he is sick, or bury him when he dies. Such are the words of the partial man, and such are his actions . . . [The universal-minded man] will say, ‘I have heard that the truly superior man of the world regards his friend the same as himself, and his friend’s father the same as his own. Only if he does this can he be considered a truly superior man.’18

Likewise, Mo Tzu imagines a warrior, strapping on his gear to do battle in a distant land while his family remains in the homeland. To whom should he entrust the care of his family: to a partialist or an impartialist? Though one may disapprove of universality himself, he would surely think it best to entrust his family to the universal-minded man. Thus people con-

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The contrast, then, is always between an apostle of universal benevolence and a partialist who is, at best, indifferent to the plight of those outside his immediate circle of concern or, more typically, someone bent on harming such people. But partialism need not involve hating people outside one’s immediate circle of concern or seeking to harm them. Instead, a robust partialism might embrace general respect for everyone, but special concern for those with whom one is related or intimate. Moreover, if choosing to entrust the care of one’s family to an impartialist with a general, undifferentiated, diluted love for everyone and a partialist who is a family friend with special allegiance, one might well select the partialist. Surely, partialism need not be “the source of all the great harm.” Taken at its most uncompromising, the impartiality thesis demands that we assume the perspective of an ideal, detached observer when arriving at moral judgments: I must attach no special weight to my own interests when determining moral action. Moreover, the fact that another person is my spouse, my child, or my intimate friend is morally irrelevant: it provides no moral reason to favor such a person over a complete stranger. An eighteenth-century English philosopher, William Godwin, sums the view up well when he considers whom he should save in a fire, an archbishop or a chambermaid, when he can save only one: “[if the chambermaid is my wife or mother] that would not alter the truth of the proposition [about whom to save] for of what great consequence is it that they are mine? What magic is there in the pronoun ‘my’ to overturn the decisions of everlasting truth?”20 We may from a moral viewpoint discriminate between people—Godwin would save the archbishop not the chambermaid—but this may be done only on the basis of non-relational characteristics, those that would attract the assent of an ideal, detached observer. We must understand that the debate about radical impartiality focuses on the level of concrete moral action. All major theories of morality agree that moral rules and principles should apply to everyone alike; that I cannot make myself an exception to the moral law. The debate over radical impartiality centers on the relevant criteria of moral choice under conditions of scarcity such that we cannot all have what we need and what we want. Crucial to radical impartiality is the vantage point from which it flows. From the standpoint of a God or Nature or an Ideal Observer each of us is equal and none of us has a legitimate claim to privilege based on identity alone. The Parable of the Good Samaritan, along with Godwin, Mo Tzu, and Singer take this God’s Eye or cosmic view.

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The moral pull of partialism But human beings making moral choices in our flawed, fallible world also have personal perspectives that seem relevant. As Sidgwick pointed out It would be contrary to Common Sense to deny that the distinction between any one individual and any other is real and fundamental, and that consequently ‘I’ am concerned with the quality of my existence as an individual in a sense, fundamentally important, in which I am not concerned with the quality of the existence of other individuals: and this being so, I do not see how it can be proved that this distinction is not to be taken as fundamental in determining the ultimate end of rational action for an individual.21

Brushing aside Sidgwick’s imperial reference to “Common Sense” (in upper case, no less), his point is telling. Unlike the answer flowing from an Ideal Observer operating from a cosmic perspective, from a personal perspective identity is significant. If the chambermaid is my mother or wife I would surely rescue her to the detriment of an archbishop should I not be able to save both. In doing so, I would not be succumbing to the talismanic power of a pronoun (“my”), but would, instead, be acknowledging that based on our relationship I owe my mother or wife more than I owe a stranger. Should I select randomly and rescue the archbishop, thereby allowing my mother or wife to die, I should be subject to moral disapprobation. Singer softens what he takes to be the best philosophical standard— give to others to the point of marginal utility—in deference, I believe, to the existence of the personal perspective. Thus, his practical answer to the question of how much should we give needy strangers is to the point where we do not sacrifice something morally significant; and, at the very least, if I am relatively affluent I ought to contribute 10% of my holdings to help reduce absolute poverty. Of course, practical considerations of limited time, effort, and resources will limit our duties to fulfilling the needs of others, even when those needs are recognized and the others are not distant strangers but known community members. Moreover, special obligations to others we voluntarily contract by dint of our occupations or personal relationships will further limit our capability of fulfilling the needs of others. Radical impartiality has stunningly counterintuitive consequences for family life. Singer ultimately does take into account people with “an unusually large number of dependents or other special needs,” but that leads to some common objections to his general view: What about my family, even

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if not “unusually large”? Don’t I owe them much more than I owe strangers? Should I reduce my spouse and children to the point of marginal utility for the sake of strangers? Don’t I owe family members more than I do others even if those other people are needier? Would not contributing even 10% of my holdings—Singer’s most modest proposal—reduce the well-being of those closest to me? The appeal to impartialism challenges those who embrace conventional wisdom to sharpen their position. Those aspiring to retain a strong preference for family and friends over the general needs of strangers might revisit the link between differences in affection and differences in material allocation. Either impartialists permit (a) no differences in our affectionate concern for family and our “love” for strangers or (b) they do permit such affectionate differences but conclude that they should not translate into differences in the way we allocate our material resources (or, at the very least, those differences in allocation should be severely limited). I’ll call the first impartialist view universal or general benevolence and the second impartialist view affectionate difference. Who has ever held the universal benevolence position? The answer is not clear, but here are the candidates: Mo Tzu and Jesus. Mo Tzu states the view most clearly, but a strict rendering of the biblical love commandment and the parable of the Good Samaritan that interprets it make Jesus a strong possibility. After all, the love commandment is not merely about deeds and the allocation of resources, but also relates to the distribution of our affection. The Good Samaritan was not simply acting on some principle of reason that established his moral duty; he was acting from his compassionate heart and was responding viscerally to a stranger’s (an “enemy’s”) need. Although Godwin has an extreme impartialist view, he need not be interpreted as requiring a universal benevolence or an undifferentiated affection; and Singer avoids speaking about affections and proudly positions his view as demanded solely by reason. Thus, they are not candidates for the universal benevolence view. How might an advocate of conventional wisdom undermine the universal benevolence approach? First, a defender of family partiality might argue that the universal benevolence approach has an impoverished understanding of the value of personal relationships. In a world where people are equally fond of everyone, strangers and family alike, the good news is that the maladies of racism, sexism, religious intolerance, and the excesses of tribalism would vanish. We could well speculate that the overall amount of global happiness would increase. Still, the bad news is that the special joys of intimacy, family affection, and deep love would also evaporate.

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Radical impartiality of feeling is incompatible with the kind of profound personal relationships that distinguish a robustly meaningful human life. Moreover, we might argue that the sorts of dispositions and virtues—such as honesty, loyalty, caring, patience, empathy, and the like—that comprise the moral enterprise can be learned only from personal relations characterized by partiality of concern. Although this is a reasonable argument, the universal benevolence approach has a plausible response: Is it so obvious that the overwhelming majority of human beings would choose our present world over a world embracing universal benevolence? The answer may well depend on whom we ask. Certainly those of us who have a reasonably satisfying network of personal relations would agree with the advocates of conventional wisdom; but those of us who suffer from intense, unsatisfied basic needs and who have experienced mainly stormy, frustrating personal relations may dissent. Taken as a world survey, which group predominates? Second, a defender of family partiality might argue that personal relations have an inherent value and a phenomenology that transcends the requirements of impartial benevolence. Personal relations are not merely different in degree from impersonal relations, they are different in kind: the metaphors of mutual bonds, connectedness, attachments, although faintly capturing the truth, are too effete. Two Sicilian slogans from my youth are helpful in expressing the metaphysical differences between familial and impersonal relationships: sangu du me sangu (“blood of my blood”—to indicate the metaphysical links among grandparents, parents, and children) and nun aviri famigghia e comu essiri un nuddo miscatu cu nenti (“to be without family is to be a nobody mixed with nothing”). Our families, relatives, and closest friends do not merely interact with us at a distance; instead, they partially constitute who we are: they help define our values, they help sculpt our self-understandings, and they widen our subjectivity beyond the self. If we substitute a tepid universal benevolence for the partiality of intimate relationships, we alter personal identity in dangerous ways. Moreover, the very notion of “love” presupposes partiality. I cannot love everyone even if I am disposed to do so. Love, as opposed to a general benevolence toward all humankind, requires, among other things, participating in common enterprises, sharing information about oneself that is not available to the general public, and spending more time with the beloved than with acquaintances and strangers. Thus, I cannot “love” everyone if for no other reason than I am strictly limited in terms of time, geographic location, and general resources. Brushing aside factors such as my incompatibility with certain personality types, my inability to find numer-

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ous other people yearning for intimacy with me, and the like, the phenomenology of love is inherently partial. Accordingly, the imperative of general benevolence inaugurates the doom of interpersonal love. Again, this is a powerful argument from the standpoint of current social theory and practice, but the prophets of general benevolence have a plausible response. The likes of Mo Tzu and Jesus could argue that the alleged present benefits of family partialism arise only because our present world is fragmented and tribal. In a world characterized by invidious comparisons, ongoing zero-sum contests, and stark distinctions between friends and foes, the consolations of family and intimate relationships seem irresistible; such connections offer refuge from and succor within a generally hostile environment. But the prophets of general benevolence call upon us to eclipse our present world and transform the planet. In a world where principles of general benevolence were widely embraced, the phenomenology of our needs and satisfactions would change. We would no longer require the comforts of oases from general hostility and estrangement because the overall environment would be one of caring and concern. Al-though teasing out the specific details of a world we have never known would be overly speculative, the point is that critics of the principle of general benevolence cannot assume present social conditions and the phenomenology of intimate relations as unalterable givens without begging the most important questions at issue (that is, assuming as true that which must be proven as true). Third, a defender of family partiality might argue that to require people to determine all of their important decisions by impartial consideration of global needs is to destroy the notion of personhood itself. The assumption here is that personhood presupposes partiality in the sense that one’s identity and personal integrity must consist in part of projects, aspirations, and life’s plans that have unique status in a person’s priority of values simply because they are hers.22 An interesting question arises. Could a prophet of general benevolence respond that with the proper moral education and socialization the general welfare, at least insofar as it involves satisfying the basic needs of everyone, could in fact become our project, life’s plan, and highest aspiration? Is there necessarily an incompatibility between thinking and acting impartially and one’s integrity? Could it not be the case that the reason partialists now suspect that there is such an incompatibility is that as an empirical and contingent matter most people are radical partialists? But is this an inevitable feature of human nature? Or is it a sad commentary on the primitive, parochial level of our moral education and socialization?

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John Cottingham, a contemporary English philosopher, would be unconvinced by the questions I have raised on behalf of general benevolence: A world in which I accorded everyone at large the same sort of consideration which I accord to myself, my children and my friends would not be ‘one big happy family’; it would be a world in which affection no longer existed because the sense of ‘specialness’ had been eliminated. It would be a world where much of what gives human life preciousness and significance had disappeared.23

One of Cottingham’s points is that an ethic of general benevolence transforms each of us into a type of dispassionate, bloodless, conscientious bureaucrat who never displays favoritism when allocating public resources. To partialists, this even-handedness constitutes a feckless moral ideal because two of the paramount points of the moral enterprise are personal transformation and social nonfungibility.24 We return to the questions which haunt advocates of general benevolence: Despite their protestations to the contrary, can they truly accommodate a moral universe where individuality and intimacy remain? Is a universe of impartiality truly a better world on balance than the partialist world that presently dominates our moral thinking? For their part, Mo Tzu and Jesus could retort that many of the charges hurled by partialism are question-begging. They may charge that partialists, instead of establishing that currently accepted notions are necessary features of human beings, merely presuppose the values of the dominant social order and then simply show how the ideal of general benevolence fails to instantiate those values. If so, then all the partialist has done is show that when judged by partialist standards, the principle of general benevolence will fail. But after all, part of the general benevolence program is to unsettle and transform precisely those partialist values and standards. The advocates of general benevolence may argue that instead of exposing embarrassing implications of general benevolence, all the partialist has done is restate part of the program of general benevolence and register shock. But this response was to be expected from the outset: the entrenched social order is unlikely to welcome a threatening challenger. Fourth, partialists will insist that the principle of general benevolence is utopian in a pejorative sense. Invoking the “common sense” of Sidgwick, partialists will point out that human beings neither parcel out their affection nor their material goods indiscriminately. We devote much more care, time, and resources to our own plans and projects, and to our own self-development and fulfillment, than we can even begin to conceive of devoting to the needs of humanity generally.

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As an empirical matter, partialists are correct. But surely the advocates of general benevolence such as Mo Tzu and, possibly, Jesus, do not deny this description of current and past practice. The real debate is whether our dominant social practices can and should be transformed. Partialists take the prevalence of common practices as strong (dispositive?) evidence that the ethic of general benevolence ethic is beyond our grasp. Because partialists are also firmly convinced that any concentrated effort to strive for the ethic of general benevolence is accompanied by devastating costs— loss of genuine personal relationships, compromise of the individual’s integrity and self-identity—they argue that the quest for this impossible dream is ignoble: we cannot achieve general benevolence and we should not struggle for it.

The unavailability of proofs The advocates of general benevolence ask us to look around this world and see what the dominant practices have wrought. They perceive partialists as overly pessimistic and point out that wide acceptance of general benevolence would not be onerous on any one individual, group, or nation, and would facilitate great overall benefits in the world. Instead of viewing prevalent past and current practices as data for circumscribing what is possible, advocates of general benevolence view them as embodying numerous moral errors that should be repudiated: to limit artificially our social possibilities by accepting the past as dispositive of the future destroys moral progress. On the level of reason, the debate between the conventional wisdom of partialism and the revolutionary aspirations of general benevolence is inconclusive. Most readers probably find themselves favoring a version of the partialist position, for most of you, by virtue of being in a position to read literature of this type, are not engaged in a brutal struggle for survival. Your probable distance from necessity permits innovative reflection on the terms of social life. But you also have or possess a reasonable chance for a network of relatively satisfying personal relations, and have deeply assimilated dominant social and moral norms. You are the readers to whom partialists can confidently appeal when favorably comparing “our” world with the hypothetical conditions of general benevolence. You appear to have much to lose and relatively little to gain, both materially and emotionally, from a conversion to general benevolence. Furthermore, even if you sympathize with the aspirations of general benevolence, and I speculate that most of you do, you will probably suspect that the burden of persuasion rests with the advocates of general benevolence. That is, no

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conclusive argument is available on questions such as these: Is human nature inherently and inevitably partialist? Can personhood exist in a world of general benevolence? Can intimacy persist where we do not favor some people in emotional and spiritual terms? Therefore, the advocates of general benevolence must convince us to change our minds because our default mindset registers partialism. Moreover, you are undoubtedly very skeptical about the prospects that the institutions of family and intimate associations can be restructured in a way that preserves their unique values to personal integrity and growth, yet embody an ethic of general benevolence. By virtue of enjoying an occupation that permits me to write essays such as this, I am one of you. Advocates of general benevolence focus on the principle of equality, as interpreted from a cosmic vantage point, as definitive of morality. Indeed, Jesus describes relations in the Kingdom of God and invites human beings to prefigure those associations today. In fact, the principle of equality is only one of many principles required for full moral assessment; and the cosmic vantage point is only one interpretive perspective. Accordingly, partialists may well claim that advocates of general benevolence generate disturbing implications only because they wrongly reduce morality to one of its component principles and judge from one interpretive perspective. Although I am not convinced that general benevolence can be proved logically unsound or empirically impossible, neither can general benevolence persuasively alter our default moral theory and practice. Paradoxically, general benevolence might be most successful in an atmosphere of relatively abundant resources where universal benevolence would be less taxing for us all: precisely the atmosphere where general benevolence would be least necessary. Where general benevolence is most needed, in circumstances of deprivation and scarcity, it may be least persuasive because great numbers of people are preoccupied with a brutal struggle to obtain life’s necessities. This paradox suggests another facet of the problem: a serious coordination problem attending general benevolence. Even those who deny the partialist conclusion that our world is preferable to a world of general benevolence must grapple with the fact that an individual’s choice is not simply between our world and one of general benevolence; instead, the choice is between our world and acting as if we are in a world of general benevolence. Acting as if a world of general benevolence existed does not, in the absence of millions acting likewise, establish the presumed paradise. The pressing question is whether I prefer acting in accord with the partialist norms of our present world or acting in accord with the norms of general benevolence while the vast majority of human beings are acting in

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accord with the partialist norms of our present world. Accordingly, even someone who is moved by the ideal of general benevolence and who is seduced by its transformative possibilities has a further question to address: Does it make moral and practical sense for me to act on that ideal while millions of other human beings remain partialists? Singer seems unconcerned about emotional attachments. At its most uncompromising his argument derives its conclusion from impartially considering interests and needs wherever they may exist and to whomever they may belong. For Singer, the moral point of view requires the principle of equal consideration of interests: we must give equal weight in our moral deliberations to the like interests of all those affected by our actions. An interest is an interest, whoever’s interest it may be. As such, Singer takes what I have called an affectionate difference approach to impartialism: a moral agent is permitted to care more about some people than others, but such differences in affection should not translate into extensive partiality when the agent allocates scarce material resources. The principle of equal consideration does not depend on a belief in factual equality, the belief that all people of all interest-bearers are actually equal in relevant physical and mental respects. Instead, the principle depends on the conviction that the most important interests, such as the interests in avoiding unnecessary pain, in developing one’s talents, in fulfilling basic needs, in enjoying personal relationships, and in being free to pursue projects, are not affected by factual inequalities. Thus, the moral point of view requires that my own interests cannot, simply because they are my interests, count more than the interest of anyone else. In this fashion, moral reasons are universal—they rise above our own likes and dislikes and ascend to the standpoint of the impartial spectator or ideal observer—which elevates them from the merely relative or subjective. From the application of the principle of equal consideration, he derives his philosophically preferred position: the standard of marginal utility— relinquish your material holdings to fulfill the basic needs of others up to the point where further donations would render you and yours to the same level of destitution that you seek to ease. His two later renderings—give to the point where you are not thereby sacrificing something morally significant and the 10% solution—are made only in deference to the difficulty of persuading people in a thoroughly partialist world to accept a stronger obligation to help those in need than they presently recognize. Singer’s standard of marginal utility does not reflect our biological inclinations, which decidedly favor partialism. Can we retain deeply felt love-bonds, but mete out our resources and service goods impartially? Does a type of moral schizophrenia result that undermines personal integ-

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rity? Does Singer mistakenly privilege only the cosmic perspective, that of the ideal observer—and thereby betray Sidgwick’s “Common Sense” that the personal perspective should not be marginalized? Of course, Singer retreats from the standard of marginal utility for practical reasons, some of which may be reflected in the rhetorical questions I have just posed. But I would argue that those questions do not merely reflect practical difficulties in implementing the standard of marginal utility, but cut to the very core of its philosophical acceptability. In that vein, regarding my time, effort, and material holdings as public resources reneges on my self-conception as an individual. As described earlier, much of life can be viewed as a negotiation between our need for robust individuality and our competing need for intimate community. Each yearning offers great reward, but, if amplified, morphs into great disappointment. Thus, my yearning for robust individuality nurtures a feeling of specialness and uniqueness, underwritten by autonomy and freedom; but if I inflate my sense of individuality, I may unwittingly invite estrangement, alienation, and hostile isolation. Meanwhile, my yearning for intimate community attaches me to projects, interests, and purposes that widen my subjectivity and connect me to larger concerns, thereby fulfilling my need to share my life and cooperate closely with others; but if I inflate my sense of community I may unwittingly suffocate my individuality, retreat too broadly from autonomy and freedom, and reduce myself to a pathetic drone in the social hive. Singer’s standard of marginal utility may well be viewed as distorting the dimension of community to dangerous caricature. If so, a critic might well conclude that a healthy dose of individualism and the personal perspective is required to balance communal obligations and to produce an acceptable morality. When the cosmic perspective reigns supreme, we are acting as impersonal spectators or detached deities, not as human beings. Moreover, the standard of marginal utility jeopardizes the principle of personal desert. Typically, we accept that people deserve the holdings that they have justifiably earned through their labors. Some of these holdings, the ranting of libertarians to the contrary notwithstanding, are properly relinquished, usually through taxation, to enterprises facilitating the common good. But, if in the name of morality, the demands on our sacrifices are pushed to the standard of marginal utility then the principle of desert is under siege. To say that I initially deserve my holdings, but I must, morally, use them to fulfill communal needs up to the point of marginal utility renders my initial claim vacuous. Why not simply appoint a Marquis of Morality who removes the requisite amount from my holdings straightaway? In which case, the notion of initially deserving my holdings evapo-

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rates in the name of full disclosure. Of course that would be coercive and involve an identifiable third party, whereas Singer’s principle is designed to convince right-thinking people to disgorge their holdings voluntarily. But that seems a minor detail for those antecedently committed to the alleged moral point of view. The acceptance of the standard of marginal utility produces the same effect as would the hypothetical Marquis of Morality. Once a well-intentioned agent voluntarily accepts Singer’s standard of marginal utility, he or she is committed to the same results as a person who voluntarily remains in a land ruled by the Marquis of Morality. In both cases, the principle of desert struggles for its existence on lifesupport. The call “from each according to ability, to each according to need,” may resonant in a communist paradise of material abundance, but it rings a sour note under the typical conditions of economic scarcity. Paradoxically, the standard of marginal utility and the Marxist slogan of economic distribution are most convincing under the conditions where they are least needed. Finally, Singer’s methodology is subject to several objections. First, he may be guilty of wrongful reductionism when he derives his concrete moral conclusions from only a few moral principles and observations. Just as libertarians can conclude smugly that all economic redistribution and taxation is theft because they operate only from the moral discourse of negative rights and duties, Singer can conclude that massive redistribution is morally required because he employs only the discourse of equality of interests. Both positions ignore a host of other morally relevant considerations that might alter their conclusions. Second, Singer’s analogy between saving a victim in a pond and contributing to famine relief is problematic in that the number of destitute people who are starving is enormous, while the number of people we encounter drowning in ponds whom we could rescue is probably zero or at most a few. If we encountered or knew of countless drowning victims whom we could save—if their number was comparable to the amount of people presently starving—our intuitions about what we owe to such victims might well change. At some point, very early I would think, we would conclude that we had given or risked enough and that it was time for others to assume their fair share of the burden. Despite the theoretical contestability of Singer’s version of affectionate difference impartialism, his philosophy provides a stark challenge to the smug complacency of conventional moral wisdom. His is a contemporary, secular rendition of the enduring Biblical questions, “Who are my neighbors?” “What do I owe them?”

CHAPTER THREE PROMOTING SOUND POLITICAL STRATEGIES

Personal identity is not crafted in isolation. As members of commonwealths, we must examine what we should expect from our political leaders, what they should expect from citizens, and what citizens should expect from each other. The connection between worthy selves and the political contexts in which they are formed remains crucial. No political thinker was more aware of that link than the Florentine, Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527).

10. Unravel the Problem of Dirty Hands: Niccolò Machiavelli “Virtue is excellence, something uncommonly great and beautiful, which rises far above what is vulgar and ordinary.” ʊ Adam Smith

Machiavelli insists that statesmen must “learn how not to be good”; that the best of them “love their countries more than their souls”; and that they “must risk their souls” in the course of executing their duties to constituents. But what is the appropriate reaction of a political agent who “uses evil well”? What sort of inner life does he experience and endure? Machiavelli never seems to explicitly analyze or even sketch an answer to such questions. Michael Walzer undoubtedly expresses the conventional view of most readers of Machiavelli: [Machiavelli] does not specify the state of mind appropriate to a man with dirty hands. A Machiavellian hero has no inwardness. What he thinks of himself we don’t know. I would guess, along with most other readers of Machiavelli, that he basks in his glory. But then it is difficult to account for the strength of his original reluctance to learn how not to be good. In any case, he is the sort of man who is unlikely to keep a diary and so we cannot find out what he thinks. Yet we do want to know him; above all, we want a record of his anguish.1

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Even though Machiavelli did not explicitly address the issue of the internal condition of statesmen, he left numerous clues in his writings that allow us to piece together the puzzle. Machiavelli’s secret is that the condition of the soul of his ideal statesman is implicit in his work if only we will attend carefully to the clues he left us. The Machiavellian hero most certainly has “inwardness” and he is surely deeply affected by the evil means he must sometimes employ. The paradox of dirty hands seemingly rests on two convictions: categorical moral prohibitions are sometimes appropriately transgressed or overridden in political and in everyday contexts; and a good person will feel and be guilty from having broken those prohibitions, while a chief executive officer embodying the excellences of his office will understand the necessity of sometimes doing so. Chief military and political officers, acting on our behalf and in our name, sometimes act in ways that are incontestably condemned by the imperatives of impersonal morality, but under certain circumstances such acts prevent great harms or achieve great goods for limited constituencies toward whom these agents owe special duties. In politics and elsewhere, we sense at times that a particular action is the best course to pursue, but that the efforts of our leaders nevertheless involve using means that are typically wrong, perhaps even horrifying. Statesmen must often transgress clear, paramount moral principles and are rightly required to do so by the demands of their positions. The paradox of being morally required by the special duties grounded in personal relationships to violate moral standards arising from impersonal morality seems irresolvable and deeply unsatisfying. If Machiavelli is correct, statesmen must dirty their hands while discharging their duties. They are at the helms of states that embody a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence and coercive means; they operate in a competitive context with numerous unscrupulous agents; they have special responsibilities to their limited constituencies that sometimes require them to infringe on the interests of humanity in general; they must sometimes appear to be what they are not in order to retain their authority; and their decisions involve higher stakes than those of private citizens. Thus, unlike private citizens, statesmen confront dirty hands situations systematically. At the international level, statesmen confront moral paradoxes generated by conflicts between the imperatives of impersonal morality understood from the perspective of an Ideal Observer and the partialist obligations they bear to their national constituents. This is a conflict within morality and not, as often supposed, a conflict between two different types of morality (Christian versus pagan) or between two different normative do-

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mains (moral versus political). Moreover, as Machiavelli never tires of pointing out, statesmen will sometimes need to use violence or dissimulation in foreign affairs given the nature of the world. Even if he is incorrect in thinking that the world is wholly and inevitably a ruthless forum for zero-sum competition, Machiavelli accurately cautions statesmen that they must embody the power of the lion in order to frighten the numerous political wolves extant among them and the cunning of the fox in order to recognize and evade the traps and machinations of their peers. At the domestic level, statesmen will often face moral paradoxes generated by conflicts between their duty to promote the common good and their obligation to honor the interests of individual citizens. In democratic and republican forms of government, they will be required to facilitate deals and broker compromises directed at accommodating diverse interest groups. The decisions of statesmen involve more people and more critical issues than the decisions of private citizens. Often, those decisions are enforced through coercive state power. In general, different groups of constituents will lodge conflicting, severe demands on statesmen. Typically operating under conditions of epistemological uncertainty and normative disagreement, statesmen must often arrive at monumental decisions while struggling with incompatible or incommensurable values. In sum, statesmen who risk but do not lose their souls acknowledge several guidelines: they must often privilege their partialist duties to advance the interests of their constituents over their obligations to support the general interests of humanity; they must sometimes choose to promote the common good of their constituents at the cost of infringing upon the interests of individuals who are also constituents; and they should not advantage members of their own family or their friends at the expense of other constituents. But such guidelines do not soften the burden of discharging the duties of statesmen; instead, they underscore the inevitability of dirtying one’s hands and straining one’s soul while holding high political office. In this manner, statesmen take the burden of evil upon themselves to secure the common good for constituents.

Patriotism and using evil well The ideal Machiavellian statesman has a default position: to act in accord with the imperatives of impersonal morality; he must know and act upon the good. Knowing and acting upon the good is not grounded in consequentialism. Machiavelli accepts that principles and actions are right or wrong independently of the consequences they produce. But statesmen must also learn how not to be good: they must not depart from the good

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when possible, but know how to enter into evil when necessary (P 15; P 17; P18; D I 9; D I 18; D III 3). Because of the nature of the world, the scarcity of desired resources, and his special obligations to advance the interests of his constituents, the statesman cannot invariably obey the imperatives of impersonal morality. Conflicts will arise between the impartiality demanded by impersonal morality and the partialism required by the duties of a particular nation’s office. In such circumstances, the statesman must recognize and act upon the distinction between evil well-used and evil ill-used (P 8; D I 45; D II 19; D III 21). Evil is used well when it is aimed at securing the most valuable social goals: founding or preserving a healthy, expansionist state, or reforming a corrupt state; driving out foreigners as a prelude to the other ends; facilitating the common good by removing obstreperous elements as a last resort; and the like. Such evil should occur in one fell swoop; it should not persist. And the means used are compelled by necessity; they are required for attaining the valuable goals. Finally, these goals serve the common good of the statesman’s nation. Effective mercy may require evil well-used, harsh measures needed for order, security, and unification. A statesman should not shrink from being considered cruel if his purpose is to keep citizens united, faithful, and safe. But to get good people to use evil well is a difficult task. The morally sensitive ruler—who is too squeamish to use evil well—may, through misguided short-term compassion, permit rebellions and insurrections to develop which do more long-range harm than the cruelest ruler (P 18; P 19; P 21; D III 3: D III 9; D III 30; Ltr. 9/16/12). Evil ill-used is, at bottom, gratuitous cruelty. It is not required to attain the most valuable goals and may be counterproductive to those ends. Evil ill-used is often disproportionate, recurrent, and frustrates the common good. Moreover, it often advances the cause of tyranny. Implicating themselves in evil, even if well-used, leaves statesmen with dirty hands, which connotes a morally-stained soul or internal condition. This is the case because for Machiavelli moral principles are absolute not in the sense that they cannot ever be overridden, but in the sense that even when they are justifiably or excusably overridden the wrongness of transgressing them remains. Accordingly, for Machiavelli, a few good ends only partially excuse the evil means necessary to attain them. Statesmen must be ardent patriots who love their nations more than their souls (Ltr. 331: 4/16/27; Ltr. 224: 12/10/13; Ltr. 270: 5/17/21; FH III 7; AW I 7). The wrongful remainders that accompany evil well-used imply that statesmen risk their souls in the service of their countries. To risk one’s soul is to jeopardize one’s character, to potentially transform oneself unworthily. Statesmen must not lose their souls because if they do they

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will obscure the distinction between evil well- and ill-used and thereby enter into evil too willingly; they will invariably become tyrants instead of stewards of the common good. Nor can they truculently adhere to the imperatives of impersonal morality and retain their clean hands because in so doing they will renege on the duties of their office and fail as patriots. Dirty hands contexts in politics are driven by agents who use evil well, but who do not conclude that their deeds arose from wrong choices or from situations in which the reasons supporting alternate actions were equal. Instead, agents who retain their souls will recognize their deeds involved violations of paramount principles of impersonal morality recognized by themselves and their constituents. Also, the victims of such deeds will conclude that they have been wronged by those violations. To risk but not lose their souls, statesmen must retain their reluctance to dirty their hands even where doing so is necessary for the national good. They must acknowledge the moral remainder, the cost, of their necessary actions. Otherwise, such leaders will too easily dirty their hands when doing so is not necessary, thereby losing their souls and jeopardizing the common good of their nations. Machiavellian statesmen must learn how not to be good, but still retain all the goodness permitted by their institutional roles. Again, they must risk but not lose their souls. The nature of the world and the structure of the moral conflicts they must confront prevent them from attaining Plato’s ideal of the perfectly balanced soul, but permit them to retain their humanity. Or so we must hope. Statesmen who risk but retain their souls will garner the highest award available to human beings: deserved, enduring glory that confers a measure of immortality upon the greatest among us (P 7; P 8, P 14; P 24; P 26; D I 10). Such a person will have triumphed over the Grim Reaper to the extent possible for finite beings.

Accountability Walzer suggests that statesmen who dirty their hands in the name of and in service to their constituents should be held accountable for their deeds. Theoretically, at least, “We would simply honor the man who did bad in order to do good, and at the same time we would punish him. We would honor him for the good he has done, and we would punish him for the bad he has done.”2 Doing so, however, may be impractical because “there are no authorities to whom we might entrust the task.”3 Still, statesmen with dirty hands should express publicly their guilt to reassert and reinforce the principles of impersonal morality. Doing so “requires us at least to imagine a punishment or a penance that fits the crime and so to

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examine closely the nature of the crime.”4 Moreover, in Machiavellian terms, public confessions and responses increase the possibility that statesmen will not lose their souls. Walzer, then, rejects the view that statesmen who retain their souls by suffering the effects of their use of evil well in isolation have atoned sufficiently. He recommends that such leaders must pay a public price and so should their constituents on whose behalf and in whose name the deeds were undertaken. Although he does not explicitly address this issue, Machiavelli would be unconvinced by Walzer’s appeal. The proposition to which Machiavelli, following Plato and Dante, subscribes is that doing evil brings about its own punishment. But that principle does not imply that agents must outwardly demonstrate their felt guilt; that they must evince a strong emotional response in the aftermath of using evil well. They should, I would argue, suffer the effects of having chosen, in the face of necessity, to transgress categorical moral prohibitions. But people suffer in different ways. For Machiavelli, public hand-wringing bears no honor. Among other reasons, political effectiveness depends in part on action that is concealed from the public. Widespread disclosure of certain actions often hobbles future possibilities. Machiavellian statesmen should not wallow in anguish or be overwhelmed with doubt. Such leaders must not permit themselves to vacillate; they must not resort to half measures; they must, instead, firmly recognize what necessity requires and resolutely serve the common good of their nation. But they cannot ignore that employing evil well still stains their inner cores and jeopardizes their characters. To ignore those facts is to lose, not simply risk, their souls. Because they are responsible for the lives and well-being of their constituents, statesmen must tread the narrow path between retaining pangs of conscience and plunging into existential angst. They can neither immunize themselves from guilt nor allow themselves to be its victim. Those who are eager to dirty their hands have already lost or will soon lose their souls, which brings no honor to them or to their nations. Those who insist on moral purity are unfit to lead their nations given the conditions of the world. In Machiavelli’s view, statesmen will face dirty hands situations early and often. The delicate balance between heroism and villainy hovers over each decision. A proper Machiavellian statesman will suffer in recognition of what he has done and what he may become in the course of acquiring dirty hands, whereas a statesman who has lost his soul will be unconcerned about confessing his supposed wrongs because he either does not recognize that his hands are dirty or he does not care. Worse, such a leader might even utter bogus confessions for his private advantage. Also, public expressions of

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guilt will sometimes jeopardize national security and will more frequently portray the chief political leader as a whimpering penitent, which will weaken the strength of his leadership at home and abroad. Everyone with average insight understands that statesmen must dirty their hands, but imagine the public relations accompanying media caricatures of such leaders should they regularly wring their hands in public. A nation’s procurement of social goods such as glory, honor, security, and material resources largely defines its political success. Yet the means sometimes required to secure such goods will trample upon the imperatives of impartial morality. Thus, statesmen who have not lost their souls will endure the internal struggle between their desire to maintain moral rectitude and their duty to maximize the likelihood of political success. The leader who retains clean hands will betray his duty to serve the common good of his country, while the leader who loses his soul will degenerate into a tyrant. Accordingly, statesmen who risk but do not lose their souls, who learn how not to be good at only the appropriate times, will be acutely aware of their irresolvable internal discord. For Machiavelli, the nature of the world and the structure of political leadership ensure that Plato’s moral exemplar—the person with a perfectly balanced soul whose resplendent rationality prevents him from ever being an agent of evil— would be a colossal failure as statesman. If Platonic philosophers were kings the common good of the state would suffer. Leo Strauss insists that “consciousness of excellence on the part of excellent men must take the place of consciousness of guilt or sin.”5 If this means only that chief political leaders must sometimes knowingly violate the moral imperatives they antecedently accept in order to rule effectively, then the passage accurately describes Machiavelli’s view. But if Strauss intends something stronger—and I think he does—then the passage is misleading. If, for example, Strauss means that statesmen must focus narrowly on attaining enduring glory and must thereby concentrate only on political success, he overstates the case. To focus narrowly on attaining enduring glory cannot imply that moral calculations become irrelevant or that statesmen simply dismiss the psychological force of moral imperatives. To do so is not to merely risk one’s soul but to increase recklessly the prospects of losing it. The Machiavellian statesman must live and act with ongoing internal tension because only that felt experience evidences the leader’s retention of his soul. To dismiss either vector of the context of dirty hands—the duty to maximize political success or the imperatives of impersonal morality—is to bring about either political failure or the loss of one’s soul. Machiavelli champions neither of these outcomes.

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In that vein, using evil well does not imply merely that what is typically seen as vice has been transformed into virtue because of circumstances of necessity or because political success has been attained. In dirty hands contexts, a moral remainder, a significant disvalue, persists: necessity provides only a partial excuse for the chief political leader’s actions appropriate though they may be. Yet, at least one of Walzer’s points remains: chief political leaders cannot be completely unaccountable for their actions. Investigative reporters, the watchdogs of a free society, must monitor abuses of governmental power and call attention to the transgressions of political leaders. The people should react appropriately to governmental actions they perceive unwise or immoral. Every society needs strict moral absolutists within the government to soften the inclination toward actions resulting in dirty hands. By refusing to compromise their moral integrity even for valuable national goals, such political agents strengthen a society’s commitment to the imperatives of impersonal morality or, at least, remind chief political leaders of the costs of transgressing those imperatives.6 By underscoring the moral alternative, strict absolutists serve valuable functions even if inflexible adherence to their prescriptions is unwise: “synergy among political actors with different moral dispositions can preserve the possibility of moral action in the political arena. They are also needed to elicit those feelings of guilt to which Walzer subscribes.”7 Furthermore, constitutional provisions and policy directives will prohibit certain actions and thereby serve as a constraint on governmental abuses. For example, prohibiting acts of torture by official decree may be sound even though extraordinary occasions will arise where torturing an enemy agent is an acceptable action—a classic case of a deed resulting in dirty hands. Without such a prohibition, leaders might resort to torture too easily without any remorse about their acts. With the prohibition, leaders must give serious pause to torture and even where it is used appropriately understand that dirty hands ensue.

The quest for glory Walzer describes the Machiavellian statesman thusly: He must do bad things well. There is no reward for doing bad things badly, though they are done with the best of intentions. And so political action necessarily involves taking a risk. But it should be clear that what is risked is not personal goodness—that is thrown away—but power and glory. If the politician succeeds, he is a hero; eternal praise is the supreme reward for not being good.8

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Part of Walzer’s description creases the mark and part of it is dangerously misleading. Yes, the Machiavellian statesman must do “bad things” well. He cannot afford to mismanage a dirty hands situation such that he is implicated in evil and also fails to attain the good end he appropriately sought. But the statesman does not “throw away” personal goodness for at least two reasons. First, he cannot lose his soul if he is to remain a successful ruler in the Machiavellian spirit. While he must compromise his personal allegiance to the imperatives of impersonal morality he cannot simply “throw away” his personal goodness. Second, for Machiavelli, deserved, enduring glory should be conferred only on those statesmen who succeed in attaining the good ends whose appropriate pursuit implicated them in evil and who also retain their souls. To suggest a separation, as Walzer seems to do, between political success and personal goodness obscures this point. For Machiavelli, political success is a necessary but not sufficient condition of deserving enduring glory. Machiavelli, unlike the masses, does not evaluate people or actions only by results. Statesmen do not earn “eternal praise” as the “supreme reward for not being good.” Instead, they deserve enduring glory because they have knowingly compromised their allegiance to the imperatives of impersonal morality thereby risking their souls for patriotic concerns; they have used evil well in dirty hands contexts; yet they have not “thrown away” personal goodness and have instead retained their souls; and they have attained the valuable ends that rendered their personal compromise appropriate. Accordingly, the penance and punishment accompanying recognition that one’s hands are dirty must remain internal to statesmen. The worst of them will suffer the least because they have lost their souls: they will either fail to recognize their wrongful aspects of their conduct or not care about them. But the problem of dirty hands is not entirely resolved within the confines of the individual conscience. If Plato, Dante, and Machiavelli are correct, if evil-doing is its own punishment, then those whose moral consciences are weakest—those who have lost their souls and thereby apparently suffer least from the wrongful moral remainders of their political acts—in fact pay the greatest price. Moreover, they will have forfeited the greatest prize of all: deserved, enduring glory grounded in patriotic adventures. Numerous excuses are available for political officers seeking to detach themselves from their choices and actions: I was only obeying institutional superiors; I was just discharging my obligations of office; I was compelled by circumstances; I was only safeguarding the welfare of the polity, and the like. For Machiavelli these provide only partial insulation from moral culpability: they help establish that the political officers made the correct

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decision. To resort too facilely to such excuses, however, makes it too easy for political officers to dirty their hands when doing so is not necessary. To prevent the loss of their souls and to ensure the well-being of their nations, political officers must assume responsibility for their deeds, recognize the lingering moral costs of their actions, and retain their reluctance to dirty their hands. Accordingly, Machiavellian statesmen must understand acutely that they are responsible for the people they become under the burden of moral conflict. To use evil well must exact a toll. The nature of the world, scarcity of resources, and conflicts between the imperatives of impersonal morality and the patriotic duties owed to constituents ensure that statesmen cannot always wield their authority with clean hands. The person strictly bound to moral purity should seek alternate employment. The statesman who solemnly and sanctimoniously intones that, “I will never lie to you,” has probably already uttered his first falsehood to the audience. If not that, then he has revealed his own naiveté or his own deluded conviction that one can retain clean hands (always follow the dictates of impersonal morality) while serving the public good. Unfortunately, moral judgments do not always come so neatly packaged and all genuine values are not always ultimately compatible: what is good for my country is not always best for the world; what is good for my country may not always be best for every citizen or group of citizens within it. Machiavellian statesmen must be decisive, squarely confront the moral conflicts emerging from their position of authority, learn to use evil well, and struggle internally with the effects of their deeds. Tribal act consequentialists, who always privilege the interests of country above wider concerns, will lose their souls and too frequently transgress against the imperatives of impersonal morality; strict absolutists will protect moral purity but fail their patriotic duties; and clueless political executives will be ignorant of the proper occasions to be good and the appropriate times to use evil well. Only those rulers who can risk but retain their souls in the face of their internal struggles with moral conflict are candidates for the deserved, enduring glory that confers a touch of immortality. The practical problem is whether actual human beings can accomplish all Machiavellian objectives. Machiavelli alludes to procedural safeguards that might prevent statesmen from losing their souls or might be used to take a leader who has lost his soul to task: public debate in assemblies, the right of citizens to bring evidence casting suspicion on their leaders’ rectitude, and rigorous standards of accountability for politicians (D I 56-59). Such institutional safeguards, public scrutiny, republican vigilance, and term limits can ease the problem.

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Despite the popular conception of Machiavelli as a realist par excellence, he does not advise statesmen to simply dismiss or suspend moral considerations in deference to pursuing appropriate political goals. Machiavelli does not simply privilege the political over the moral. Instead, he recognizes that statesmen must risk but not lose their souls. The paradox of dirty hands, then, resides within the conflicting demands of morality itself. Statesmen who have learned how not to be good must begin by empathizing with those who will become the victims of evil wellused: they must imagine what these victims will feel and what the statesmen would feel if they were the victims in the instant circumstances. But if evil is to be used well, statesmen must overcome their compassion and empathy for the victims. At the international level, they hold the better angels of their nature in abeyance in the name of other moral considerations: fulfilling their partialist obligations to advance the common good of their nation. Even though they use evil well, they acknowledge that doing so involves violating a categorical moral principle—a transgression that remains a wrong and leaves an immoral remainder even though the overall action confers a partial excuse upon the perpetrator. Accordingly, the perpetrator has dirty hands and a soiled soul even though he or she performed the proper deed. Statesmen, then, should feel guilty because they are guilty.

The paradox of political remorse But the feeling of guilt is multi-layered and unique to dirty hands situations. The feeling is not merely one of regret, a desire that a particular state of affairs had not obtained or a specific result had not occurred. To regret that something happened does not imply that the person was guilty of wrongdoing or that the person wishes that he or she had acted otherwise or even that the person was part of the causal chain leading to the unfortunate outcome. I can regret that John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963 even though I played no role in the causal chain that led to his death. I can regret that I injured someone in a motor vehicle accident while understanding that I committed no wrong and without wishing that I had acted otherwise. If the event was genuinely an accident then I am innocent of wrongdoing and could not reasonably have avoided the outcome even though my agency was part of the causal chain leading to the injury of another. The appropriate response for a perpetrator with dirty hands is a special sort of remorse.

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Typically, remorse arises when we acknowledge that we have violated a moral principle and we are thereby guilty. We recognize that we acted wrongfully and we should vow not to act in such manner in the future. Typically, such remorse is expiated through some combination of restitution, punishment, suffering, and repentance. But the remorse in a dirty hands context is different. Here perpetrators knowingly and willingly violate a categorical moral principle in service of other moral values. They must, therefore, accept full responsibility for their actions. They must recognize that their hands are dirty and their souls are stained. Perpetrators feel the disquieting weight of the immoral remainder that persists even though the overall action confers a partial excuse upon their behavior. While they may regret the circumstances under which necessity pressured their complicity in using evil well, they do not vow not to act in such manner in the future. Instead, if they genuinely used evil well they need not wish that the situation had not occurred. (Although they, again, may regret the power of necessity and wish that there was an alternate way to attain the optimal outcome. They should also hope that similar situations do not occur in the future.) In my judgment, here public expiation is problematic. In such cases, punishment is inappropriate unless it is also somehow accompanied by honor—a difficult pairing to conjure. Rehabilitation is inappropriate because the perpetrator’s wrongdoing is partially excused and he or she selected the proper course of action overall. Repentance is inappropriate for reasons already cited: if precisely the same situation occurs in the future, perpetrators of the first deed should act in the same way then. Reparations to victims may be appropriate where possible. But even these may be better bestowed privately than publicly. Suffering is appropriate, but if dramatized publicly can undermine a statesman’s future authority. Moreover, those who have used evil well should also experience a measure of justified pride and not simply wallow in remorse. They assumed the burdens of leadership; brought about the better result given the available alternatives in the instant situation; discharged their partialist duties to their constituents well; and did so by risking their souls. Accordingly, the paradox of dirty hands is mirrored in the state of mind appropriate to those who use evil well: a delicate balance of a unique brand of remorse leavened by deserved self-pride. Such a paradoxical emotion can help perpetrators understand the boundaries of morality and underscore the fine line between using evil well and inflicting gratuitous wrongdoing. The moral identities of Machiavellian statesmen are fragile and cannot be measured solely by the success of the outcomes of their political decisions. The moral consciousness of statesmen is both a check upon and an imped-

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iment to the discharge of their political responsibilities. They must endure in a context of moral ambiguity: from their (hopefully) superior powers of judgment, insight, and vision arise partial excuses for deeds prohibited to private citizens and profound responsibilities for ensuring the collective well-being of their nations. The statesman’s internal condition. To sum up the state of mind of Machiavellian statesmen: x They must embrace conventional morality as their default position and thereby accept the categorical character of numerous imperatives; x But they must learn how not to be good and how to use evil well occasionally; x They must recognize the moral tensions involved in a dirty hands situation when such circumstances present themselves; x On the international level, when no alternative deed is practical, sometimes they must act resolutely to advance the parochial interests of the common good of their nations over their general duties to the whole of humanity or they must otherwise violate a categorical moral principle; x On the domestic level, when no alternative deed is practical, sometimes they must act resolutely to advance the common good of their nations over their duties to honor the interests of individual citizens or they must otherwise violate a categorical moral principle; x In so doing, they must heed the distinction between using evil well and inflicting gratuitous evil; x Still, even if they use evil well, they must acknowledge the immoral remainder of doing so: violating categorical moral principles engenders moral costs; x After perpetrating such deeds, they should experience the requisite emotions: a paradoxical remorse seasoned with a deserved selfpride; x They should make reparations, if possible, to the victims of their deeds, who will often have legitimate grievances adjusted to the circumstances of necessity; x But they should avoid public confessions or dramatic displays of their moral guilt; x They must reflect systematically on the deleterious effects using evil well can have on respect for categorical moral values and on their own characters. To that end, they must be vigilant in examining the condition of their souls;

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x They must avoid habitual moral transgressions to the extent possible. They must recognize that the more an agent uses evil well the easier it is to resort to evil means in the future and the more likely that the agent will inflict gratuitous evil when doing so is convenient and utilitarian. Machiavelli’s rendering of dirty hands is, unsurprisingly, aristocratic and heroic. Statesmen must not only occasionally dirty their hands, but must also be thoroughly versed in the ways of evil. They must “learn the way to Hell in order to steer clear of it” (Ltr. 270: 5/17/21). Statesmen must risk but not lose their souls by learning how to live with, how to repel, and how to use evil well at times without becoming evil. But the actions of ordinary citizens remain constrained by the imperatives of conventional morality: they “cannot under cover of good do evil” (D I 46). Indeed, the moral corruption and lack of civic virtù of the masses are important contributing causes to the problem of dirty hands. Consequently, confronting the problem of dirty hands is one only for solo political agents, those with supreme power and grave responsibilities who operate without overly intense media scrutiny. As princes of monarchies and heads of republican governments during the Renaissance, Machiavelli’s statesmen were not subject to an extensive system of checks and balances upon their authority. Because of the nature of the world and the general condition of human beings, Machiavelli insists that the actions required to promote the common good cannot be produced systematically by invariably following the imperatives of conventional morality. Also, politics involves inherently gaining at the expense of others: “the purpose of a republic is to enfeeble and weaken, in order to increase its own body, all other bodies” (D II 2). Statesmen have special authority to do what is necessary to establish, maintain and expand the common good, and they exclusively must bear the burdens of doing so. Walzer’s call for public confessions and punishments for statesmen who have dirtied their hands would gain no traction in Machiavelli’s historical context. There, statesmen must confront the results of their actions alone or with only a few advisers. Although Machiavelli’s writings do not include a report of the internal anguish of statesmen, reconstructing the clues he leaves about the statesman’s soul suggests a peculiar sort of remorse flavored with deserved self-pride. As far back as Aristotle, philosophers have advised that habits structure character (NE 1103a14-1104b13, 1148b15-1154b35). The good person embodies stability and constancy of character that facilitates understanding of what is right. Rectitude requires not merely doing the appropriate things but also developing and nurturing the proper internal

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condition of the soul. For Aristotle, the relationship between character, choice, and action is critical: “acts are called just and self-controlled when they are the kind of acts which a just and self-controlled man would perform; but the just and self-controlled man is not he who performs these acts, but he who also performs them in the way just and self-controlled men do” (NE 1105b5-1105b8). The proper way of performing such deeds, then, demonstrates the harmonious internal condition of the just and selfcontrolled person. Merely performing just deeds does not of itself establish a person’s harmonious internal condition. Thus, if statesmen violate categorical moral principles in a particular set of circumstances, that increases the likelihood that they will transgress those moral values in the future. Repetition promotes desensitization. Moral character is subject to gradual corruption until the agent no longer internalizes the categorical moral principles he or she has knowingly transgressed repeatedly. Moreover, even limited use of a technique such as torture jeopardizes our empathy for the suffering of others, a fundamental emotion promoting a host of categorical moral principles. Machiavelli understands the connection between habit and character. Accordingly, he describes evil well-used as “those atrocities that are committed at a stroke, in order to secure one’s power, and are then not repeated, rather every effort is made to ensure one subject’s benefit in the long run” (P 8). The difficulty, however, is that given his view of the world, the general nature of human beings, and the role both play in creating “necessity,” statesmen will encounter dirty hands situations on multiple occasions. If they remain in power for an extensive length of time to conclude that they will lose and not merely risk their souls is reasonable. A complication is that Machiavelli is well aware that those of high moral rectitude will be most reluctant to become statesmen through the violent means that are typically required, whereas those who are antecedently wicked will embody no such compunctions (D I 18). Thus, government authority is most likely to rest with those who have already lost their souls than with those in a position to risk them. As becoming a statesman is not the recommended occupation for those seeking moral rehabilitation, the result will too often be massive, gratuitous evil. Complicating matters further is the role of the constituents of statesmen. Our leaders soil their hands and stain their souls on our behalf and in our name. Except for the most naïve citizens, most constituents will insist that their political leaders keep faith with categorical moral principles generally but will recognize that they will be required by necessity to violate them occasionally. Constituents tolerate espionage and violations of wiretapping restrictions on certain types of criminal suspects, but prefer not to

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have these matters brought to their attention. Because statesmen act for our benefit and in our name, we share the guilt: our hands are also dirty and our souls are also blemished. Yet if our leaders go too far we must rein in their excesses and abandon our allegiances to them. Citizens, then, embody an ambiguous role: we turn our eyes away from routine transgressions that involve using evil well, but must serve as guardians against gratuitous wrongdoing. We play a critical role in ensuring that politics does not become too dirty and that our leaders retain the moral quality of their souls to the extent practicable. Furthermore, when our leaders lose their souls we must call them to account. Accordingly, citizens should have access to sufficient information about the workings of their government: we must know enough but not everything. This suggests yet another delicate balance. Machiavelli expertly reveals the paradoxes of resolute political leadership and vigorous citizenship. About four centuries later, Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) sketched the prerequisites of hygienic cultural transformation.

11. Incite Political and Cultural Transformation: Antonio Gramsci “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” ʊBuckminster Fuller

History is replete with violent political revolutions, some of which have succeeded and others of which have failed. Those that succeed often engender surprising, unwelcome consequences. Is it possible that the ends of revolution are prefigured in the means used to incite and wage the rebellion? Is there a way to avoid contaminating the result by purifying the process that defines the revolt? Antonio Gramsci was convinced that the answer to both questions was “yes.” Gramsci aspired to loosen Marxism’s scientific and material inclinations and reinstate the importance of cultural and ideological change. He was inspired by Marxism’s democratic impulses and by the need to translate ideas into political action.9 But Gramsci distanced himself from Marx’s scientific pretensions and convenient invocation of historical and economic laws. Gramsci intended to sketch a new vision of politics empowering those hitherto on the margins of power and privilege. Although a committed Communist, Gramsci nevertheless cast a critical eye toward the excesses of fundamental Marxist theory and Soviet practice. He avoided freezing

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his political thoughts in fixed doctrines or philosophical systems. Instead, he self-consciously wrote in fragments that invited future development. Most of his important work was written under censorship while he was imprisoned, so the precise meanings of many of Gramsci’s fragments are inherently controversial. His access to material was limited while he was imprisoned and Gramsci was frustrated by his inability to consult all available sources. He evaluated his work concretely—Would it contribute to the political struggle against the dominant social order?—although he understood that prison life isolated him from the people on the margins who must translate his theory into political action. Gramsci did not take himself to be imposing abstract ideas on social reality. He was convinced that his work would have value only if the ideas arise from social reality and help realize a politics of inclusion. Although the philosophical idealism of Benedetto Croce greatly influenced him, Gramsci criticized Croce for contributing to the defense of mainstream liberal-capitalist politics and for defining national character in terms of an intellectual elite class. Nevertheless, Gramsci also saw Croce as a promoter of intellectual reform who rejected religion, scientific dogmas, philosophical system building, and irrational myths. Gramsci also appreciated Croce’s concise, clear literary style and historicism which he took to be prime reasons for Croce’s growing influence in Europe. Gramsci deepened his understanding that all human activity is political through his reading and analysis of Croce’s writings.

Ideological hegemony Earlier Marxist thinkers insisted that the working class was an inherently revolutionary force, that capitalism’s collapse was inevitable, and that the manner of collapse was predictable. Gramsci rejected these convictions. Instead, he believed that liberal-capitalist regimes were able to transform and reproduce themselves despite their persistent economic contradictions. They did this, according to Gramsci, by establishing ideological hegemony which stabilized capitalism and reinforced its grip on citizens. An ideological hegemony consists of values, cultural attitudes, beliefs, social norms, and legal structures which thoroughly saturate civil society. Whereas earlier Marxist theorists stressed the role of the state and the way economic forces molded dominant ideas, Gramsci emphasized the active role ideas play in class struggle and denied that a single cause, such as economics, could explain all social development.

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Major social institutions—the state, legal systems, schools, workplaces, churches, families, media—transmit the dominant ideas and the practices they support. A nation’s popular consciousness is thus transformed. The most solid ideological hegemonies receive general acceptance and come to be viewed as natural, appropriate, perhaps even inevitable. In this manner, the ruling ideas become so deeply embedded in social relations that they are internalized by citizens as common sense. An ideological hegemony conceals the sources of its ideas and practices—particular power relations and specific historical circumstances—and presents itself as ahistorical truth. For Gramsci, the state mobilizes both force and consent. As a forum of ideological and political dispute and a major medium through which the dominant classes lure popular consent, the state plays a major role in solidifying ideological hegemony. But instead of relying mainly on the dominant Marxist analyses of economic base-ideological superstructure and state power, Gramsci introduces the notions of historical bloc and ensemble of relations. An historical bloc is formed by popular groups built around a common ideology which challenges the dominant set of ideas. Economic, social, and ideological forces combine to change social conditions. Social forces intrude on existing class domination and coalitions are formed to shift the ensemble of relations, the totality of social relations in historical context, to a new social order. While not ignoring the important role of economics in social change, Gramsci refused to view all cultural and ideological reality as caused only by economic factors. Gramsci contrasted passive revolution with popular political struggle. Conducted mainly through state agency, passive revolutions respond to a perceived crisis by changing the economic structure from above. In contrast, popular political struggle requires the active participation of the masses. Popular political struggle requires a crisis of authority. Revolution must undermine the spiritual power of the ruling classes by penetrating the false appearances tied to the dominant order and by creating a new set of beliefs, cultural attitudes, and social relations. A counter-hegemony must challenge and augur the collapse of the old authority patterns. At early stages of revolt, we can expect mass apathy, cynicism and confusion as the gap between the promises and the performances of the dominant order widens. Next, we can expect overt, political forms of class struggle: the spread of anti-authoritarian norms, the development of new social relations, anti-establishment subcultures, new language codes, and emerging ways of life. State repression and force may follow. Such a response may

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serve to quell rebellion if the underlying counter-hegemony is weak, or ennoble the rebels by drawing new supporters if the counter-hegemony is strong. Successful revolution requires the unsettling of the old ensemble of relations and the transformation of civil society, which prefigures a new state system built on nonauthoritarian foundations. The revolutionary process will involve lengthy transition periods and much unpredictability. Such revolutionary strategies constitute a war of position in which the civil society of a developed nation is the object of attack. In contrast, in primitive societies Gramsci advised wars of movement in which the state is the object of frontal attack.

Sparking revolution But what will energize a revolution? Marxists were divided between two answers: spontaneity and vanguardism. Advocates of spontaneity theory held that the working class would rise up to overthrow the state once capitalism could no longer mask its economic contradictions. A time would come when capitalism’s relations of production could no longer efficiently use developing technology. Economic conditions would be so bleak that workers would no longer be mystified by the ideological superstructure and they would solidify into a revolutionary class. In contrast, advocates of vanguardism were less likely to view workers as an inherently revolutionary class. Instead, they stressed the role of the communist party in actively promoting and organizing political struggle. Although Gramsci at various times was drawn to each of these models, his considered judgment was that each was fatally flawed. His relentless commitment to political inclusion undermined vanguardism by an elite force, while his equally strong conviction about the revolutionary role of ideas unsettled spontaneity theory. Instead, he advanced the notion of organic intellectuals. Gramsci viewed traditional intellectuals such as writers, artists, philosophers, and the clergy as an independent social class typically divorced from social action. In contrast, he emphasized how all human action is inherently political and how all reflective human beings are intellectuals. Although not necessarily the bearer of special technical knowledge, working class intellectualism is woven into the fabric of everyday life. Gramsci was also convinced that there exists a general historical process that tends continually to unify the entire human race. Once he combined his inclusive vision of politics, his conviction that history tended to extend high culture, and his belief that all human action is political, his notion of organic intellectuals followed.

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Thus, the underclasses must generate their own intellectual base, revolutionary consciousness, and political theories from self-activity. The solution to lagging revolutionary consciousness among workers is not reliance upon a vanguard elite class that seeks to impose a rebellious spirit externally. Nor is the solution blind insistence that communist revolution is inevitable and working-class consciousness will arise on cue at the appropriate historical moment. The solution is for workers to become revolutionaries through activity at job sites, in homes, and in civil life generally. Decades prior to contemporary feminism, Gramsci insisted that the personal is political. Again, Gramsci highlights the importance of extending democracy through ideas which translate to social activity. The revolutionary party must be a mass party rooted in everyday existence. It must be an agent of social change which coordinates historical forces already in motion. Most important, it cannot be a force of external imposition if it is to prefigure a classless, radically democratic social order. Gramsci, perhaps more than any other Marxist thinker, understood that political ends are prefigured in the means used to achieve them. If the goal is a classless, sharply democratic society which absorbs the functions of the modern state, then revolutionary activity must itself assume that form. Rather than advancing a universal model of communism, as did Joseph Stalin, Gramsci counseled popular movements which paid careful attention to existing national character and differences in historical circumstances. Because he understood theoretical activity as a changing, dialectical part of mass struggle, he was sensitive to novel ideas, ambiguity, unevenness, and indeterminacy. His own work reflects little dogmatism and a robust sense of the inherent contestability of political strategies and ideas. Gramsci presents a clear alternative to the historical materialism of Karl Marx, the vanguardism and state centralism of Vladimir Lenin, the spontaneity theory of Rosa Luxemburg, and the social democracy of Eduard Bernstein. He underscored the democratic impulses in Marxism: the need for workers to nurture and express their own critical consciousness; the importance of liberating ourselves from the constraints of false necessities; the practical advantage of viewing revolution as a series of human, active political events; and the role of consent in both sustaining and unsettling dominant political arrangements. Gramsci distanced himself from the scientism of Marxism: his historical bloc and ensemble of relations analysis alters the economic base and ideological superstructure model; he did not believe in the historical inevitability or clear predictability of communist revolution; and he viewed history as indeterminate. His political genius, though, goes beyond his commitment to Marxism. His theory

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contains lessons for social revolutionaries positioned on all points of the ideological spectrum. To understand his war of position as tied only to Marxism is to permit opportunities for social change to breeze past. What is most attractive about Gramsci’s political program is also most easily contested. His boundless, naïve faith in the intellectualism of the masses cheers our egalitarian spirits, but has not ignited salutary cultural transformation; his aversion to violent revolution earns our sympathies, but ignores historical reality; and his reliance upon a war of position elates our democratic sensibilities, but may register, at best, only painfully slow social progress.

A cautionary tale Perhaps Gramsci’s greatest contribution is the cautionary tale his philosophy embodies for potential revolutionaries. His emphasis on ideological hegemony informs us that genuine political revolution must be preceded or at least accompanied by wider cultural change. Overthrowing an oppressive regime militarily will not automatically expedite the inauguration of the revolutionaries’ preferred political structures. At times, powerful world nations such as the United States will be quite properly outraged at the excesses of totalitarian governments such as Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Leaders of such nations may allow themselves to be captured by a fantasy: if only we destroy the tyrant, the people will rise up, cheer democracy, and a new egalitarian republic will emerge. Where overthrow of the dictatorial leader promises to be relatively easy, the temptation to take action amplifies and seduces. In 2003, to a large extent this process energized the invasion of Iraq. The good news was that overthrowing the tyrannical regime was even easier than anticipated. Although promising the “mother of all wars,” Saddam Hussein generated the feeblest of all battles. His tyranny was deposed and he was captured with even fewer coalition casualties than expected. However, the bad news was unsurprising for those who had studied Gramsci. Lacking democratic traditions and having endured centuries of oppressive theocracies and dictatorships, the citizens of Iraq lacked the cultural prerequisites for instituting an egalitarian republic. Predictably, ethnic and religious strife, which was previously moderated by tyrannical power, blossomed. Instead of tens of thousands of Iraqi taking to the streets singing paeans to democratic reform, longstanding resentments and internecine rivalries proliferated. The words of Gramsci whisper in our ears: without a significantly effective historical bloc that might create a counter-hegemonic force, the established ideological hegemony will sty-

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mie successful efforts for radical social transformation. Regime change does not translate automatically to salubrious political conversion. As I write, more than a decade after the fall of Saddam Hussein, the volatile situation in Iraq is ongoing and coalition forces continue to search for a graceful exit strategy. Gramsci’s cautionary tale remains vibrant. Gramsci has had great influence, particularly in Italy, among leftist thinkers who are suspicious of the scientism of early Marxism, the tyrannical excesses of the Soviet model of communism, and the doctrinal posture of Communist parties generally. Perhaps it is not merely a coincidence that for decades Communists in Italy, inspired largely by Gramsci, gained consistent political influence through parliamentary means. A dispute will remain, however, whether this shows that political activity inspired by Gramsci’s work is easily co-opted by liberal-capitalist regimes, or whether we are witnessing the building of a counter-hegemonic force capable of eventually unsettling the dominant ensemble of relations in Europe. At present, we have a long way to go to achieve a new state and social system built on nonauthoritarian foundations. Hierarchy and division remain, smugly enjoying the bounty of their misdeeds. Profoundly influenced by Nietzsche and Gramsci, a contemporary social theorist and Brazilian politician, Roberto Unger (1947- ), has outlined a political strategy that transcends the tedious debate between capitalism and communism.

12. Go Beyond Communism and Capitalism: Roberto Unger “If I can’t dance to it, it’s not my revolution.” ʊEmma Goldman

Socialist experiments in the USSR and eastern bloc countries failed fundamentally to attain their highest aspirations. China is permitting more elements of capitalism into its system annually. Yet the major capitalist countries seem vaguely dissatisfied with certain aspects of their economic and political institutions. Is there a way to transcend communism and capitalism? Or, alternately, is there a way to combine or synthesize elements of each system in service of a better form of political association? Many familiar leftist political themes—distrust of political hierarchy and social division; concern about vast economic inequalities; zeal for transcending existing social contexts; attraction to heroic and romantic action; and infatuation with grand social visions—resound in the work of Roberto Unger.

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The problem of context Unger tells us that we all experience the “problem of contextuality”: ambivalent feelings of being (1) necessarily embedded in a thick cultural and social context which seemingly defines the limits of the possible and impossible, and (2) able to transcend cultural contexts and limits as we experience modes of thought and being that cannot be translated adequately by the logic and language of current norms.10 Our experiences, then, embody mixed messages of necessity and freedom. Unger casts his lot with freedom. Reminiscent of Nietzsche, he argues that human beings are most truly themselves when engaging in activity in which we deny the false necessities generated by the structures of social life. For it is during such activity that we celebrate the possibilities of our infinite personalities. Thus, Unger concludes that the animating drive of human passion is to transcend the cultural contexts that structure established forms of personal relations, intellectual inquiry, and social arrangements. This conviction drives his political agenda. Why should context-smashing be our animating drive? Unger answers that there is only one noncontingent fact of human personality: contingency itself—the capability of human personality to transcend the limits of the culturally determined possible and impossible.11 While we cannot transcend all contexts at once and experience contextlessness itself, we can transcend any particular context at any particular time. Unger concludes that to advance self-understanding and to mediate our existential dilemma, we must open ourselves to full experiences of personal encounter, thereby giving complete expression to our need while accepting the accompanying danger. Unger acknowledges that the act of context-smashing creates a new context: we are never unencumbered and unsituated. However, we progress as we ascend to looser contextual structures that encourage their own destabilization, thereby giving currency to human personality. Although we never ascend to an Archimedean point that might arrest all future context-smashing and we never create a nontranscendable context that is indisputably superior to all competitors, some conditional contexts are preferable to others based on their flexibility and acceptance of destabilization. Again, the criterion of success is connected to whether a context promotes or frustrates what Unger takes to be the one noncontingent fact of human personality: contingency itself. The human drive of self-assertion includes the yearning not to be limited to any particular social role; it is the need to undertake experiments in self-knowledge and self-redefinition. Unger invokes three rhetorical questions to provide additional support for his plasticity and empowerment

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theses: Do his conceptions suggest “more readily verifiable or falsifiable ideas”? Are his theses compatible with a persuasive and potent social theory? Are his theses validated by the “qualified introspection” of human beings?

Human personality and normativity To avoid the charge of contentlessness—for what can truly follow from claims about the plasticity of human nature?—Unger seeks a normative conception of human personality which fuses description and prescription, but does not fall prey to skepticism or abject relativism. According to Unger, the four main images of personality, as reflected in literature and philosophy, are: the heroic ethic as contained in classical Greek literature; fusion with an impersonal absolute as depicted by Hinduism and Buddhism; Confucianism; and the Christian-Romantic ideal.12 Unger argues that if we take these four images, cleanse them of aspects which deny the infinite quality of personality, then the remaining theoretical ideas converge and produce similar answers to our most important normative questions. From the first two images of personality, Unger discerns the importance of authoritative principles that transcend the mundane, equivocal sphere of human interaction. Yet both the hero and the speculative monist manifest unattractive features: efforts “to become invulnerable to others and to the disappointments that may result from not being in charge.”13 Thus, the heroic ethic and the ethic of fusion with an impersonal absolute rightly venerate the transcendent qualities of human personality, but wrongly disengage from heightened mutual vulnerability. From Confucianism, Unger identifies the importance of contextuality and the intimate connection between human passions and societal structure. Yet Confucianism wrongly insists on freezing the terms of social debate and on rigid social hierarchies. Finally, from the ChristianRomantic ideal, Unger recognizes a commitment to concrete persons and to the search for human empowerment: a conviction in the primacy of the personal encounter with love as its redemptive moment, accompanied by an iconoclastic attitude toward particular social arrangements. Love and iconoclasm are necessarily bound: the world must be transformed; contexts and hierarchies must be unsettled, so that human openness and vulnerability to love may flourish. It is from a “modernist criticism and restatement of the Christian-Romantic image of man that forms the central tradition of reflection about human nature in the West”14 that Unger fash-

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ions a theory of human identity that does not depend on religious commitment. Unger insists that the concept of infinite personality permits us to avoid abject relativism, while the phenomenon of convergence provides a substantive conception of human personality. The resulting conception of human personality includes the primacy of personal encounter and love, and a commitment to social iconoclasm. Heightened mutual vulnerability is a prerequisite for advancing self- understanding, and, according to Unger, we are most empowered and most truly ourselves when we engage in context-transcending activity informed by faith, hope, and love. Unger has been taken to task for allegedly adopting the classical method of logically deriving normative conclusions from a particular view of human nature.15 Critics have argued that it seems puzzling to derive anything from claims about the plasticity and contingency of human nature. Such claims appear to be an admission that we cannot discern who or what human beings are. Thus, to begin from conditionality and indeterminacy and then purport to derive substantive conclusions seems preposterous. Because his efforts can be viewed as just another failed attempt to deduce by means of classical logical categories substantive (and ahistorical) moral and political conclusions, some political radicals can plausibly charge Unger with intellectual treason. By his apparent acceptance of the standards of proof, truth, and argument which, from their perspective, emanate from the false consciousness of the dominant centrist regimes, Unger may be viewed as trying to play the other guy’s game while adding only one more rule or assumption—his one unconditional fact of human personality. The charge is that all Unger has done is changed the initial premise of a tired and disreputable centrist political argument, and in so doing merely amended that argument by moving from a closed theory of human nature to an open theory. Despite the breadth of his thought and the originality of his political program, he is doomed to failure by his very acceptance of some mainstream philosophical categories and ways of carving up and describing the world. Moreover, by accepting such categories Unger may be revealing an objectivist impulse which would repel many political radicals. In defense of Unger it must be noted that classical thinkers such as Plato and Hobbes derived substantive normative conclusions from fixed theories of human nature. In contrast, Unger contends that fixed theories of human nature are too often merely projections of the current social and political order, and not the discoveries of ahistorical truths about human personality. Fixed theories of human nature, therefore, artificially restrain

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thought and action. Accordingly, Unger is less a prisoner and more a liberator of classical method. This defense of Unger, although true, does not meet the critics’ point. For critics here do not necessarily dispute the type of theory about human nature that Unger advances, but the very method of trying to derive moral conclusions from a theory about human nature. However, a stronger defense of Unger is available. He is not at all deriving moral conclusions from a theory about human nature. Rather than there being an antecedent, determinate theory of human nature which might set the boundaries of normative disputes, it is one of the tasks of moral theory to help form the most acceptable nature for which persons should strive. Unger posits only one noncontingent fact about human personality: its ultimate plasticity. But he recognizes clearly that no substantive conclusions can follow from such a starting point. To avoid the charge of contentlessness he provides a more substantive view of human personality—one informed by the convergence of the four main available images purged of those aspects that deny plasticity. But even here he does not pretend to derive deductively his programmatic vision from his substantive view of human personality. Unger would agree that we cannot appeal to an antecedent and disembodied theory of persons as an axiomatic starting point in our quest for moral theory. Rather, a theory of persons partly constitutes particular versions of moral theory, and the acceptability of a moral theory helps determine the acceptability of its component theory of persons. The notion of “acceptability” used here is much looser and contestable—appealing to concrete experiences of human personality more than formal categories— and this suggests strongly that Unger is not trying to meet the strict standards of deductive proof. Hence, the critics’ charge is misplaced. His critics here are the “ultra-theorists,” to use his own phrase.16 Renouncing attempts to develop general explanations and comprehensive plans for political transformation, they mercilessly thrash the conclusions and justifications of the dominant ideology and often conjure images of a more desirable social life; but they do not formulate deep theoretical justifications for their favored practices. At their most radical, they ridicule all normative discourse and revel explicitly in arbitrariness and nihilism. For Unger, ultra-theorists, by obliterating the links between normative discourse, theoretical insight, explanatory power, and practical action, cripple effective and liberating theory and practice. Lacking an underlying explanation of the respective roles of contexts and context-smashing in human flourishing and empowerment, ultra-theory collapses into a nomi-

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nalistic form of standard social science or degenerates into the most virulent forms of relentless existential rebellion for its own sake. Given that he believes that there is one objective nonconditional fact of human personality, Unger cannot go all the way and claim that everything is always up for grabs. To do so would court a philosophical nihilism which he denies. But he does more than merely relocate the point of conflict; he provides a structure which is designed to allow the fullest amount of social conflict consistent with his commitment to honor and facilitate the infinite human personality. Once he denies that everything is contingent he must build from what is objective.

The complexities of progress However, at first glance, Unger’s notion of progress seems puzzling. He tells us that, despite our inability to transcend all conditionality, progress is possible as we “loosen the limits” of conditionality. But if progress means that some conditional forms are less conditional than others, or that some conditional forms are better than others, Unger may be presupposing a standard by which to evaluate conditional forms which itself is not conditional. Alternatively, if progress acknowledges that all forms are equally conditional—a democracy of conditionality—then it is not clear to what progress amounts. Is it simply the explicit recognition that our modes of discourse are conditional, and the appreciation of the freedom we exercise when we continually recombine and reimagine contexts? Or is progress simply the process of recombination and reimagination itself? Finally, it is not clear that the prescription to accelerate revision follows from the assumption that all forms of social life and all modes of discourse are conditional. We might well decide that, given the fact of conditional forms and modes, we should not accept any given structure as ultimate truth; we might well allow a reasoned process of change in our structures and modes; but why choose to accelerate revision? In the absence of evidence indicating that such a change would be an improvement—A higher form of conditionality? A closer approximation of a nonconditional standard? A higher realization of freedom?—Why advocate change for change’s sake? Unger would probably reply that his model is based on a modern view of science. Science progressed from the Euclidean paradigm to another paradigm. The best science is viewed as capable of accelerating selfrevision; recognizing and absorbing anomalies and incongruous perceptions; but without destroying itself or repressing the facts it has found.

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Science might be viewed by Unger as transforming the fact of conditionality into an intellectual advantage and theoretical method. More fundamentally, progress can be defined in terms of Unger’s one unconditional fact of human nature: its ultimate plasticity. Unger acknowledges that the act of context-smashing creates a new context. However, we progress as we ascend to looser contextual structures which encourage their own destabilization, thereby giving currency to human personality. We are not engaged in self-defeating rebellion for its own sake, but transform contexts for a purpose: to liberate human personality so that its one objective aspect can flourish. We never discover the Archimedean point which might arrest all future context-smashing; we never create a nontranscendable context which is indisputably superior to its competition; but neither are we trapped by a democracy of conditionality. There is a nonconditional standard by which to evaluate various conditional contexts: the one objective feature of human personality. Some conditional contexts are superior to others based on their flexibility and acceptance of destabilization. The contrast here is between rigid structures that resist attempts at destabilization and flexible structures that facilitate their own transformation. In rigid contexts, the distinction between context-preserving and context-transforming activities is relatively clear, while in more flexible contexts there is no firm distinction between the two activities. Presumably, context-smashing itself does not turn into yet another routine because the process is neither ceaseless nor monotonous; progress, in the senses noted earlier, can be made. Moreover, Unger tries to document how plasticity has been paramount in military, economic, and social triumphs throughout history. Accordingly, we should accelerate revision in order to precipitate an understanding of ourselves and as a requirement of worldly success. It must be noted, however, that Unger is not seduced into extolling a condition of permanent indefinition, a ceaseless flux of conflict and transformation. Instead, he acknowledges the need for relatively tranquil periods of stability: “[W]hat should the moment of rest be like? To a greater or lesser extent it may keep the qualities that distinguish the moment of transformation.”17

General concerns Still, doubts linger about the overriding value of context-smashing. In the words of Ernest Weinrib: “What Unger ignores is that the capacity to negate context does not immediately tell us how we are to act but only what it is to act. Through this feature of action normativity becomes intel-

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ligible, and it is therefore not a feature to which normative force can simply be ascribed.”18 We must question whether Unger, like Nietzsche, ultimately overrates the human need for context-smashing activity and underrates the human need for context-preserving activity. These two types of activity correspond to the human needs for adventure and security, and it should be clear that the relative attraction of these needs differs radically among people of varying education, age, gender, socioeconomic class, and aggressiveness. Offering no guarantees and exhilarated by the promise of empowerment, Unger also heightens social risks: heroism and tragedy may be inextricably joined. Will “everyday people” be attracted to such a vision? Will the many who are less politically inclined than Unger truly be empowered by the activity he and other intellectuals cherish? Does Unger demand too much of us when he insists that we risk mutual vulnerability and gamble with our deepest fears? Can human beings achieve much the same benefits with less risk by smashing contexts that are local and personal, and thus less intractable than Unger’s grand institutions? Other critical questions emerge: Is Unger’s vision an accurate account of human personality? Or is it the highly stylized projection of an academic who himself is closely bound by particular contexts that impel him to universalize his own real or fantasized proclivities? Does Unger merely peer into a mirror, discern activity that best animates his passions, and then project the results upon the entire human race? Unger has a seemingly limitless faith in the liberating capability of ideas and the heroic potential of purposive context-smashing. This faith is both his glory—as it accounts for the breathtaking imagination and brio of his work—and his betrayal—as it suggests isolation from the aspirations of common people. In any event, his perceptions of human personality trigger Unger’s legal and political prescriptions. Social arrangements, rather than being depicted classically as a set of concrete social institutions defining a fixed and closed structure, should incorporate destabilization mechanisms. Such mechanisms must undermine existing social arrangements and unsettle hierarchical relations before they firmly solidify into entrenched power. Unger’s goal is to recognize the contingency of our institutional and social arrangements, and open them to transformation. As such, Unger places no faith in communitarian arguments that presuppose citizens sharing fundamental ends. Acceptance of these arguments too often leads to “paralysis of the power to innovate” and “self-conscious austerity.”19

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Thus, rather than advancing a particular, substantive political situation—such as socialism, communism, liberalism, republicanism—to which all societies should aspire, Unger concentrates on the process and necessity of recurring social change. His project can be viewed as grafting the framework of radical contingency onto the classical method of arriving at normative conclusions from a conception of human nature. Unger’s project thus realizes two immediate theoretical advantages over other radical philosophies: he can easily engage the dominant political discourses while seemingly retaining the radical implications of his main theses, and, unlike several versions of Marxism and feminism, he need not get bogged down in the elusive subtleties embodied by the notion of “false consciousness.” As such, he can act as an insider but preserve an outsider’s transformative panache. For Unger, political change cannot be achieved by advocating violent revolution, by abrogating law or democracy, by vilifying the policies of the United States, nor by fantasizing a new abstract idea of society; rather, transformation is achieved by the internal development of existing legal doctrine, social relations, and political institutions. The locomotion of social change is fueled by alterations in the relative functionality and transformation of existing formative contexts, not by the unveiling of comprehensive alien ideologies. Internal development is animated by two themes: no one scheme of political association has conclusive and everlasting authority, and the mutual correction of abstract political ideals and their specific institutional embodiments offers the best chance of significant political change. Internal development is the process by which we create new institutional embodiments for our ideals, and alter our ideals and the spheres of their domain. Social power must no longer be viewed, as it is by the disciples of false necessity, as antecedently right or necessary; but is instead exposed as laden with contestable political presuppositions. Here the distinction between officials such as judges and lawyers, and laypersons becomes less clear as deviationist legal doctrine (extending the use of peripheral doctrine in law to more evenly balance social power among classes) and internal development employ looser and more contestable standards of rationality, and produce tentative conclusions. Unger advocates a particular system of rights, a central economic principle, and an organization of government. Although Unger leaves their specific embodiments to the collective deliberations of the people, he does provide the following general outline. He begins by affirming that we must radicalize the available conceptions of rights in order to avoid solidifying forms of privilege and hierar-

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chy. A scheme of rights should not reify a particular version of social life because such sanctification is yet another manifestation of false necessity. The internal development of existing ideals of rights and democracy when combined with respect for our infinite personalities will afford human beings a measure of security without concomitant domination. Unger takes an altered scheme of rights as important for its own sake and “also for its encouragement to a systematic shift in the character of direct personal relations and, above all, in the available forms of community.”20 The central economic principle is the establishment of a rotating capital fund. The central agencies of government would set outer limits to disparities of income and authority within work organizations, and to the distribution of profit as income. Capital would be made available, temporarily and at a rate of interest, to teams of workers. The fund, which would disaggregate the control of capital into several tiers of capital takers and givers, would aim at maintaining a constant flow of new entrants into the economy and ensuring that no economic enterprise could use legal devices to seclude itself from market instabilities. The long-range aim of the fund might involve more decentralization and economic experimentation. The government would be organized in accord with three principles: (1) the branches of government should be multiplied to ensure that every feature of the social order is subject to destabilization and broadly-based conflict; (2) conflicts among these increased branches of government should be resolved by principles of priority among the branches and by appeal to the electorate; and (3) the political party in office must have a genuine opportunity to implement its program.21 Critics will be concerned whether Unger’s program will result in perennial economic insecurity. His heralding of long-range decentralization, a rotating capital fund, and disaggregated property rights, will strike many as anathema to traditional entrepreneurial incentives and destructive of citizens’ confidence in business enterprise. Moreover, both his specific economic and general programs may seem hopelessly indeterminate and vague. To meet such criticisms, Unger advises that we constitutionalize some of the procedures and rules of the rotating capital fund, thereby shielding them from radical instability. But given his view of the judicial role, the importance of deviationist doctrine, and general proclivity against freezing the terms of social life, it is doubtful whether this maneuver would be desirable or effective. He is more likely to subject the issue of the relative amount of economic security to recurring public conflict. His economic program gambles that constraints on individual and family capital will be

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outweighed by the greater mobility of and access to capital made possible by the rotating capital fund. Unger’s economic program must be viewed in the light of his other prescriptions concerning the reorganization of work. Rejecting public ownership of the means of production, Unger denies as well the rigid distinction between task-definers (employers and managers) and taskexecutors (workers). Rather, he strives to accelerate interaction between the two work sectors and to insulate no component of the workplace from politics and the logic of recombination. Although this program remains indefinite, he feels this problem besets any programmatic vision which tries to avoid appeals to objectivity without lapsing into abject skepticism. Viewing his program as a contestable proposal which itself is subject to political conflict, Unger prefers it to what he takes to be the illusions of current democratic-centrist practice which gives large-scale investors explicit monetary incentives and which insulates managers and owners from the possible destabilizing effects of mass democracy. Unger suggests that current centrist practice falsely extrapolates from one possible economic predicament: under-consumption during periods of economic growth. Unger decries present practice, where a relatively small group of investors has disproportionate voice in the market; instead, he places his faith in the greater mobility of and increased access to capital by more groups of entrepreneurs. At bottom, Unger has no clear proof to rebut the critics’ charge about economic instability, but he can offer a host of plausible considerations. His firm conviction is that current democratic-centrist practice rests on the illusion that our particular form of the market is necessary. But this illusion nourishes economic rigidity which can only end in long-term economic inefficiency. Moreover, centralized-communist attempts to maneuver macroeconomic aggregates by a combination of public ownership and the authority of technical experts has also failed. His alternative is vague and indeterminate, but his goal is unwavering: increased mobility of and access to capital, when combined with restructuring of workplace relations and recurrent political conflict, will result in greater long-term efficiency than current practice and will serve to invigorate and transform our market. More generally, critics have charged that Unger’s preferences for context-smashing and destabilization, while applauded by modernist intellectuals, are not representative of ordinary people.22 Most human beings, it is claimed, yearn for increased security and more firmly settled contexts, and experience upheaval and radical change as unwelcome threats. Thus, Unger’s call for increased human empowerment through the transcendence of

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fixed structures is in fact an elitist’s self-indulgent fantasy. The masses of people, who are denied the material comforts which upper class intellectuals take for granted, appreciate the security of a fundamental structure susceptible to alteration no more disruptive than marginal adjustment. Unger’s response to such a criticism would undoubtedly point out the stabilizing aspects of his own program: immunity and solidarity rights; constitutionalization; and the right to remove oneself from political conflict or leave the state entirely. Moreover, he might reiterate that the fear of context-smashing is simply another manifestation of the paralyzing effects of the illusion of necessity communicated by centrist ideology. Rather than accepting the alleged longing of the masses for security as a basic independent fact of human nature, Unger would perceive it as damning evidence that dominant ideology has retarded the flourishing of our infinite personalities. Accordingly, we should take the critics’ charge as further proof of the need to liberate the masses from the political status quo, and not as a demonstration of any presumed inadequacy in Unger’s account. To adjudicate this dispute we would have to deal more fundamentally with Unger’s claim that there is one and only one noncontingent fact of human personality. That is, is the masses’ craving for security a sign of a deeper fact about human nature or is it merely further evidence of the corrupting influence of dominant politics? Moreover, some radicals will insist that Unger’s is a romantic and ultimately impotent vision. Fueled by the background assumption that rational argument can raise social consciousness and liberate us from the chains of dominant ideology, Unger renounces violent revolution as the instrument of social change. Yet, some will argue, true and lasting fundamental change is not produced by better rational demonstrations nor by more comprehensive social theories; instead, it springs from widespread alterations in the perceptual grids through which human beings view and understand their daily activities. Such sweeping upheavals, they will argue, only dog the footsteps of class struggles and successful violent revolution. This criticism hits at the practicality of Unger’s “superliberalism” and its prospects for implementation. Unger’s predicament here is clear: if he advocates violent revolution he can be attacked as utopian because the prospects for successful revolution in the major centrist-capitalist regimes are worse than dim; if he advocates consciousness-raising and exalts the role of theory as the engine of social change he can also be attacked as utopian, because many believe that theoretical vision plays at best a minor role in the restructuring of fundamental politics. But this predicament may

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merely underscore the present power of dominant centrist ideology in the West. Thus, Unger’s predicament directs us back to Gramsci’s philosophy. In order to escape from the attack that his program is impossible to implement and doomed to be mere theory divorced from practice, Unger could cite the advances made by feminists. It is undeniable that by raising social consciousness without threats of violent revolution feminists have succeeded in leading significant change. While it may be countered that feminism has in fact been coopted and assimilated by centrist-capitalist regimes, Unger can still maintain that the necessary link between violence and political conversion is hardly unbreakable. At worst the prospects of success for meaningful political change in the West seem no dimmer for consciousness-raising than for violent revolution. On the other hand, centrist critics will be tempted to inquire whether Unger’s program of recurrent conflict and incessant appeals to conditionality will invite the rise of overtly authoritarian regimes. In the absence of objectively true moral and political standards, Unger’s program may seem to encourage relentless instability as all moral and political issues appear to be permanently up for grabs. Under such conditions, critics fear that totalitarian regimes will eventually be embraced as a way of providing security and order in the face of political anarchy. Unger, however, has a plausible response to such a criticism. He could claim that the rise of totalitarian regimes is not implied by the fact of conditionality or by the presence of recurrent political conflict, but is instead generated by the depoliticized character of large segments of unorganized and manipulable citizens. If this is correct then his program constitutes an antidote to totalitarianism because his central aspiration is to extend the political franchise to more citizens in more areas of their everyday existence. Moreover, Unger’s program is not a celebration of permanent, overt revolution. Unger aspires only to efface the distinction between full-blown revolution and total stagnation. Thus, he would strive to disassociate conflict from fundamental, non-negotiable issues and confine it to concrete, compromisable proposals. For Unger, our political choices are not confined to “chaos or totalitarianism or centrism.” Roberto Unger’s social theory exemplifies the spirit of cultural possibility and unbridled enthusiasm for transcending the social and political status quo. Although highly problematic, his theory accepts and transforms the radical political legacy partially attributable to Gramsci: distrust of political hierarchy and social division; concern about vast economic inequality; zeal for transforming existing social contexts; and attraction to heroic, romantic, but nonviolent action.

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Unger aspires to transcend the polarities of the tragic progressive reformer and the disillusioned revolutionary. Reformers recognize on some level that our institutional framework is the contingent result of a series of historical power struggles, but feel powerless to enact significant change beyond merely marginal adjustments. Revolutionaries lust for utopian community and the elimination of vested power, but soon discover that the mechanisms and occasions of revolution are absent in the dominant democratic-centrist regimes. Nothing remains but obeisant service to the power brokers of the status quo or drab immersion in the petty squabbles of routine centrist politics. Unger advises us that the internal development of the great emancipatory promise of classical liberalism provides an alternative: a path of transformation without extravagant, fanciful utopian claims, and without the fear and bloodlust of violent revolution. Going beyond the insipid reformer’s allegiance to incremental change and marginal adjustment, and drawing on the traditions of Nietzsche and Gramsci, Unger’s animating spirit compels us to reimagine our social world, and measure ourselves and our institutions by what we and they might become. His political and social agenda embodies no guarantees and significant risks, but may still offer a glimmer of hope for those yearning for democracy without hierarchy, community without central oppression, and political transformation without carnage.

CHAPTER FOUR LIVING MEANINGFULLY

In the course of building our characters, nurturing healthy personal relationships, and fulfilling our moral duties to other people, we must confront larger, sometimes frightening questions: Does human life have inherent meaning? If so, what is the nature of that meaning and how do we cultivate it? If not, is it possible for human beings to still create their own fragile meaning? How might that be accomplished? To begin to answer such enormous, but unavoidable questions, we must consult Albert Camus.

13. Transform Your Destiny: Albert Camus “Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.” ʊRalph Ellison

Camus revived the ancient Myth of Sisyphus.1 Condemned by the gods to push a huge rock to the top of a hill from which it fell down the other side, to be pushed again to the top from which it fell again, and so on forever, Sisyphus was doomed to futile, pointless, unrewarded labor. His immortality was part of his punishment. His consciousness of the hopelessness of his project was his tragedy. Sisyphus’s life supposedly represents the human condition: repetitious, meaningless, pointless toil that adds up to nothing in the end. Although Sisyphus is not mortal, that deepens and does not redeem the absurdity of his life. Although some people might think that human life bears more variety than Sisyphus’s life, from the vantage point of the myth the matter is only one of degree. For example, some human beings take solace in producing and raising children, but that can be viewed as more of the same: adding zeros to zeros. Unlike Sisyphus, we are mortal and our children—the next generation—assume our burdens when we expire.

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The absurd Camus argues that human beings desperately crave inherent value, meaning, and a rational cosmos, but discover only a neutral, purposeless, indifferent universe. We cry out for understanding and for answers to our most fundamental questions, but the universe is silent. Thus, Camus is convinced that the cosmos is inherently meaningless. The enormous gap between these human needs and an unresponsive universe is the crux of absurdity. Once we recognize the absence of a master plan and the absurdity of our existence, we must try to face down our own insignificance, our alienation, and lack of ultimate hope. From a cosmic perspective, human life is fatuous: we scurry about with great self-importance; we mask our despair with bombast; and we are vulnerable to the equally hollow cheers and derisions of our colleagues. But in the end, our acts are impermanent, lack enduring value, and cannot realize an ultimate culmination. In sum, the myth of Sisyphus suggests that human lives are ongoing exercises in futility. The absurd is not a philosophical concept, but a lived experience. Centuries earlier, Marcus Aurelius (121-180) had turned to Stoicism as an antidote to the possibility of cosmic meaninglessness. Marcus rejected that possibility and, instead insisted that faith that there was meaning and purpose built into the world was necessary for vibrant living. For Marcus, cosmic meaningfulness must be accepted for its practical advantages: to accept that the cosmos was meaningless would paralyze our creativity and sap our energy. Although Marcus was intellectually honest and admitted that he could not prove that the cosmos embodied inherent meaning, he accepted that notion because of Stoic cosmology and pragmatic effect.2 The possibility of cosmic meaninglessness, the lack of any inherent order and purpose in our world, repelled Marcus. He prefigured the existential tension of the 20th century: Human beings have a compelling need to understand reality in meaningful and purposive ways, but the cosmos seems indifferent to our yearnings. Marcus responds through faith—belief, conviction, and action in the face of radical uncertainty. Adjusting Stoic orthodoxy and refusing to accept cosmic meaninglessness because doing so devalued human intellect and reason, he places his faith in a type of pantheism. The divine is the universe and all things, including human beings. All things, then, are pervaded by one god and implicated with one another. The eternal journey of the divine is assumed to be worthy and grand, although ineffable. Marcus Aurelius locates the meaning of human life in its role in advancing the divine goal. The divine, for Marcus, is not an independent being or substance, but rather the process of glorious cosmic evolution toward more valuable ends.

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As a faith, Marcus Aurelius understood that his world view could not be independently and rationally proved. His faith, though, spawned a practical advantage: it vivified engagement with the world and nourished healthy human relations. A worthwhile human life must be purposive. The highest human purpose is contribution to society. The most valuable human skills are scarce and make the greatest positive impact on the common good. Marcus Aurelius, unsurprisingly, advised us to accept our mortality and view death as transmutation and not as an end. Part of our gratitude for our lives required that we perceive our deaths as necessary for the cosmic cycle. He does not champion personal immortality. Instead, our souls persist after death only to reenter the cosmos and the flow of nature. Camus would deride Marcus Aurelius’ philosophical conclusions as inauthentic, psychological crutches. Instead, Camus concluded that we cannot transcend or destroy the absurd nor can we establish cosmic meaning by mere belief. Instead, we must accept that the cosmos is inherently meaningless. Our task is to forge and manifest our characters by our response to it.3 Where the will to do so is resolute, we can transform apparent adversity into practical advantage. Absurdity involves ridiculous incongruity. Extreme irrationality, a striking disharmony or discrepancy between states of affairs, and unrealistic pretension typically constitute the absurd. The unrealistic pretension is the widespread human yearning for a rational and just universe, an ultimate culmination to our lives, and the possibility of connecting to enduring value. The striking disharmony is provided by an unresponsive, inherently meaningless universe. The absurd, then, is the enormous gap between our yearnings and the silence of the universe. According to Camus, three responses to the absurd are available. First, we can seek the false consolations of psychological crutches. The most common crutch is religious commitment which desperately tries to eliminate the absurd by fabricating a possibility for attaining our deepest cravings. According to theism, while inherent value, meaning, and a rational cosmos may not be available to us in this lifetime, leading our life in prescribed ways will earn redemption and ultimate fulfillment in an afterlife. Alternatively, we could take the approach of Marcus Aurelius, who anticipates Hegel: Personal immortality is unavailable to us but we nevertheless play a role in the historical progress of an inherently purposive universe. By recognizing this, human beings can view their lives as infused with meaning and purpose. If we lack the faith or imagination required for religious commitment or Aurelian-Hegelian metaphysics, another kind of psychological crutch is

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available: denying our yearnings for inherent value, meaning, and a rational cosmos. If we do not desire this lofty trinity, then the benign indifference of the universe is untroubling. By casting aside these cravings, we eliminate the gap between expectation and result that constitutes the absurd. Thus, these psychological-crutch strategies allow us to pretend that human life is not absurd. Camus regards these mechanisms of denial as inauthentic, weak, and unworthy of us. They seek flight in fantasy as a distraction from robust confrontation with our fate. Second, we can always commit suicide. But Camus views ultimate despair as cowardly. Peering into the profound void and feeling the hot breath of nothingness, we cravenly evade our fate by ending our lives. While suicide may be rational under the direst conditions—when we can no longer benefit from or contribute to our most cherished projects, interests, relationships, and commitments—under ordinary circumstances it bears no honor. Third, Camus understands that most human beings continue to act on their preferences, values, and concerns despite a sense of cosmic meaninglessness, an awareness that no preordained or built-in meaning or value permeates our universe. Camus’s preferred authentic response requires awareness of the absurd; living life in the face of our fate; affirming life through rebellion; maximizing life’s intensity; and dying unreconciled. For Camus, the myth of Sisyphus portrays the eternal human struggle, but also the indestructible human spirit. Sisyphus can transform his initially pointless task through his emotions. He can embody the highest values of an existential hero. He can relentlessly confront his fate, refuse to yield, reject psychological crutches, embrace no doomed hopes for release, and create a fragile meaning through endless rebellion and luxuriating in the immediacy of life. Camus imagines Sisyphus “happy” as the “struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.”4 Camus oscillates, then, between two responses Sisyphus might embrace to wrench conditional meaning from his absurd context. .

Sisyphus the defiant hero Camus advises Sisyphus to meet the gods of the myth with scorn and rebellion. He must condemn the gods for condemning him. Fueled by resentment and bravado, Sisyphus refuses to bend or to beg for relief. He cannot live within an overbearing cosmic perspective from which his life is insignificant, so Sisyphus revels in his hardness and endurance. He creates virtues out of contempt, pride, and strength. Like a stubborn army recruit sentenced to continually dig and fill the same hole in turn, Sisy-

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phus’s victory is in his refusal to seek the consolations of ordinary human beings. He will not admit defeat or yield. He will not ask his tormentors, whom he regards with disdain, for mercy: they can control his body but cannot influence his mind. Sisyphus lays a patina of defiance on extraordinary mental toughness. His attitude is a monument to the human spirit: authenticity leavened by determination. Sisyphus turns the gods’ sentence into a test. He resolves not to yield to the futility and boredom that would crush ordinary spirits. He will show the gods that he will not be defeated. He will take the punishment and come back for more. Through his defiance, Sisyphus will prove to himself and the gods that his is not a common spirit. He will forge an eternal project from what is an inherently futile, meaningless, mundane task. The image invokes mixed blessings. Some of us will admire Sisyphus’s heroism and defiance as he distances himself from typical human reactions. He has proved himself superior to his peers and has denied the gods the added satisfaction of watching him writhe in misery. Oriana Fallaci, in her memorable novel, A Man, captures well the allure of the rebellious spirit: The true hero never surrenders, he is distinguished from the others not by the great initial exploit or the pride with which he faces tortures and death but by the constancy with which he repeats himself, the patience with which he suffers and reacts, the pride with which he hides his sufferings and flings them back in the face of the one who has ordered them. Not resigning himself is his secret, not considering himself a victim, not showing others his sadness or despair.5

Other people, though, will not embrace Sisyphus’s self-styled martyrdom. Fueled by resentment, utterly detached from commitment beyond rebellion, intolerant of lesser responses, and keenly aware of his punishment, Sisyphus-the-rebel may embody a destructive romanticism. Robert Solomon, for example, is deeply ambivalent about Camus’s embrace of rebellion and scorn as an antidote to an inherently meaningless universe: There is something both beautiful and pathetic in [Camus’s] quasi-rational, emphatically existential attitude. Shaking that puny fist at God or the gods is so poignantly human, so pointless, and at the same time meaningful. Of course, such behavior makes no conceivable difference to anything, except in our own attitudes . . . But what is beautiful and revealing about [Camus and other like-minded existentialists] is precisely their refusal either to dismiss [the philosophical question about the meaning of life] or to despair at the answer. They provoke an irresolvable tension . . . between our pas-

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Is Sisyphus a robust battler or is he a fugitive from life? Does the martyrdom of Sisyphus bear victory or does it confer additional power on the gods’ decree? Sisyphus is and his project does all of these. Critics might insist that to assume this perspective is to reject life. But others will rejoin that we should never embrace the oppressor. And if the universe lacks inherent value and meaning then life is an oppressor. All that remains is the refusal to yield.

Sisyphus as flowmeister Camus offers Sisyphus another possibility: to bask in the immediacy of his life, to engage in the process of living to the fullest extent, to immerse himself in the textures of experience. Sisyphus should avert his gaze from questions of what he is accomplishing by hurling himself into his task with gusto. He must pay close attention to the rock as it travels and to the textures of his journey. By luxuriating in the process of life and by living in the present, to the extent possible, Sisyphus transforms his relationship to his task. He is so thoroughly engaged in his task that the meaning of his life is single-minded engagement. From this perspective, Sisyphus is too busy and too fascinated with the wonders surrounding his journey to focus on contempt for the gods: “each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that nightfilled mountain, in itself forms a world.”7 Ken Ravizza and Tom Hanson capture well the image of Sisyphus as flowmeister: The gods watched Sisyphus take a different approach each time he pushed the rock up the hill. The first time he got a feel for what the rock and hill were like. The next time he went as fast as he could, the third time he tried to see how gracefully he could push the rock, and the fourth time he tried to see how slowly he could push it. Each time he had a different purpose in mind. Because he had a purpose, Sisyphus stayed focused on his task and pushed the rock with intensity. He actually enjoyed the challenge of coming up with different ways to push the rock and took pride in that ability.8

Here Sisyphus ignores his punishment. No longer fueled by resentment nor preoccupied with scorn of the gods, Sisyphus basks continually in the wonder of the moment. This image softens the condemnation of the gods by ignoring it. The gods’ victory is diminished by its irrelevance to Sisyphus’s life. Sisyphus appreciates his life and finds joy, even meaning. He

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rejects bitterness, refuses to view his world cynically, and chooses engagement. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes these periods of total engagement: “the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.”9 The wisest way to animate our lives, then, is to increase the amount and type of flow experiences. The way to nourish our maximally affirmative attitude toward life and to realize unalienated labor is through increasing our experiences of flow. Although flow experiences are immeasurably valuable for their own sake, they also bear great instrumental value. Such experiences not only express our creativity in salutary ways, but are also critical for our greatest existential projects: making a worthy self, leading a life worth examining, and constructing a valuable narrative. [Every flow experience] provided a sense of discovery, a creative feeling of transporting the person into a new reality. It pushed the person to higher levels of performance, and led to previously undreamed-of states of consciousness. In short, it transformed the self by making it more complex . . . in the long run optimal experiences add up to a sense of mastery—or perhaps better, a sense of participation in determining the content of life.10

Existential philosophers, such as Soren Kierkegaard, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Martin Heidegger, argue that social obsequiousness and abject conformity are the greatest obstacles to leading an authentic life. By subconsciously trying to renounce much of our freedom and fixing our characters through the perceptions of others, we renege on the task of authentic selfcreation. We fail to recognize our freedom, avoid making self-conscious choices upon which we act, and flee from taking responsibility for the person we are becoming. Flow experiences invigorate our robust sense of freedom by focusing on gratifications stemming from our own creative powers: “If a person learns to enjoy and find meaning in the ongoing stream of experience, in the process of living itself, the burden of social controls automatically falls from one’s shoulders.”11 Existentialists who believe that the cosmos is inherently meaningless, that no preordained value or meaning is built into the world, claim that our attitudes and creative powers can construct fragile meaning and value. Much like we can create meaning and value upon a blank canvas through our creative endeavors, we can endow the universe. But the benign indifference of the cosmos is initially frustrating. We yearn for a connection to enduring value, an ultimate culmination for our lives, and a rational and

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just universe. The universe cannot answer our entreaties. We cannot take solace in societal conventions or popular opinions because such standards pander to mediocrity. Flow experiences distance us from the crowd and revitalize our sense of freedom and autonomy. To overcome the anxieties and depressions of contemporary life, individuals must become independent of the social environment to the degree that they no longer respond exclusively in terms of its rewards and punishments. To achieve such autonomy, a person has to learn to provide rewards to herself. She has to develop the ability to find enjoyment and purpose regardless of external circumstances.12

Flow experiences that foster enjoyment have eight dimensions: a project we think we have a possibility of completing; that demands our focus; that is defined by specific goals and furnishes immediate feedback; that requires profound involvement that pushes aside our mundane anxieties and frustrations; that affords us a sense of control over our activities; that temporarily allows us to transcend our self-absorption but later energizes our sense of self; and that permits us to lose track of time as we are unaware of the pace at which moments pass by. Flow experiences are so enjoyable that we are willing to expend great effort, much time, and forego numerous other opportunities to pursue them. They are the best antidote to boredom and repel the hot breath of cosmic nothingness. The justification of climbing is climbing, like the justification of poetry is writing; you don’t conquer anything except things in yourself . . . The purpose of the flow is to keep on flowing, not looking for a peak or utopia but staying in the flow . . . In normal life, we keep interrupting what we do with doubts and questions . . . But in flow there is no need to reflect, because the action carries us forward as if by magic . . . people become so involved in what they are doing that the activity becomes spontaneous . . . they stop being aware of themselves as separate from the actions they are performing.13

To throw yourself into the task, to be so deeply engaged that time is irrelevant, to enjoy an activity for its own sake and not merely its outcome is a metaphor for life itself. The process becomes paramount. The daunting metaphysical question—“To what does it all add up?”—is brushed aside. In the grand scheme of things, from a cosmic vantage point, it matters not who succeeds and who fails. But for engaged participants this is where they have staked their lives for periods of greater or lesser durations. Our projects gain importance only because we deem it so. We invest our ener-

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gies, efforts, commitments, and convictions; we become flowmeisters as process overtakes outcome. The best experiences of flow, though, are episodic and unique. We cannot live our entire lives as flowmeisters even if we so desired. The temporary loss of a sense of self, total immersion in the project at hand, and suspension of our awareness of time energize our spirits. At their best, flow experiences add complexity and nuance to our major project of crafting worthy selves. However, excessive immersion in flow experiences bears serious risk: dehumanization through inadequate reflection. Bracketing the cosmic perspective, without a robust sense of past and future, and oblivious to other possibilities, Sisyphus as perpetually engaged flowmeister could become less human. Perhaps Sisyphus would be relatively happy, innocently contented, or simply too engaged to assess his condition. He, nevertheless, would risk dehumanization because his facticity (given context) might suffocate his transcendence (freedom). Sisyphus works busily in his chains, but does not recognize how he remakes his context. An important message lies at the heart of the image. Human beings too often project into the future while immersed in the everydayness and routines of life. We ignore the textures of the immediacy of life as we busily fulfill our daily schedules and fantasize about a better future. In the meantime much that is valuable in life seeps through our fingers. Sisyphus’s obsession with the moment threatens his humanity, but maybe he has little choice given his fate. We have more freedom of focus. Even if total immersion in the flowmeister image is dehumanizing, a dose of it is healthy given the structure of our lives. In sum, neither the unrepentant rebel nor the thoroughly engaged flowmeister is a fully adequate response to the supposed absurdity of the human condition. Both images, though, reflect different virtues that are crucial to constructing a robustly meaningful life. Instead of choosing one image over the other, we are better advised to combine aspects of each. Perhaps we can create meaning and value in our lives even if the cosmos is inherently meaningless. But what particular activities are best able to facilitate that task? To talk of defiance and flow provides only a strategic framework. We need more specific guidance as to the activities we might focus upon to counteract cosmic meaninglessness. Let us begin by examining some thoughts offered by a philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and leftist political activist, Karl Marx (1818-1883).

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14. Promote Creativity: Karl Marx “Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.” ʊSoren Kirkegaard

Many people embrace a thick theory of human nature, one that describes who we are by referring to a set of fixed attributes. For example, to portray human nature as inherently self-interested or perhaps even selfish, or as inherently altruistic is not uncommon. If we are inherently selfinterested then the role of society may be to moderate our inclinations in order to establish workable interpersonal relations and promote civilization. If we are inherently altruistic then the role of society may be to not overwhelm our inclinations by inviting invidious interpersonal comparisons and heartless competition. In any case, a thick theory of human nature argues that we are defined biologically by a particular set of persistent characteristics that limit possibilities for political associations. Abrogating all thick theories of human nature, Marx argues that human possibilities are historically created, largely by economic systems. Although human beings are limited by their biological make-up, their natures can embody an indefinite variety of forms: our human nature is elastic and moldable. Accordingly, Marx embraces a thin theory of human nature. The only unalterable aspect of human nature is our need to create and to produce. In his view, the greatest human need, beyond those factors required for biological survival, is for creative labor that is freely chosen and thereby inherently stimulating. Marx’s highest value is the fulfillment of what he calls our “species-being.”14

Alienated work The enemy of creative labor is alienated work. In general, to be alienated is to be hostilely estranged, to be antagonistically disconnected from others, the environment, even one’s self. To be alienated, then, is to be opposed to or distant from our proper relationship to others, the environment, or our selves. The alienated person is unfulfilled and may be unaware of the causes of the dissatisfaction. In Marx’s view, the history of the world has been the continuing narrative of the alienation of human beings from their productive nature. For example, classical Marxism argues that under capitalism workers become alienated in at least four ways. First, they are alienated from their employers, the capitalist owners who dictate the terms of workers’ production. Second, Marxism warns that workers in the capitalist system, competing for economic crumbs tumbling off the owners’ tables, will soon be

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alienated from each other. Workers will view each other as competitors in a zero-sum capitalist game. My victory, better wages and working conditions arising from a promotion, can come only at your expense. Third, workers become alienated from their labor. Lacking control over what they produce, how they produce it, and what happens to what they produce, workers experience labor as burdensome. They work only because they must satisfy their survival needs. They dread yet another day at the factory, while looking forward only to holidays and weekends. Fourth, workers become alienated from themselves, from their highest aspirations and grandest potentials. They, instead, are tethered to a capitalist yoke, sunk in everydayness, as their lives are sets of dreary routines punctuated by a few, low level diversions. If Marx is correct, capitalism mystifies social reality through “false consciousness,” by which we misidentify the origins of our firmest beliefs. We are convinced these beliefs are derived independently from observations of human behavior, when they are actually produced by the needs of particular economic systems. For example, in a capitalist society, economic competition is critical. Thus, our convictions supporting a thick theory of human nature that we are inherently self-interested are culturally induced by an economic system that needs workers to be self-interested; rewards such behavior; and provides disincentives for contrary actions. As a result, most workers act in self-interested ways and respond to material incentives to a significant extent. Observers who accurately perceive such widespread behavior may inaccurately conclude that human beings are inherently self-interested. They may further conclude that because of this thick theory of human nature the best economic system to champion is capitalism. If we are oblivious to this process, we will be convinced that our beliefs about human nature are independently derived from empirical observations. If Marx is correct, this is an example of false consciousness because we have failed to understand the process by which are conclusions about human nature were manufactured by the needs of capitalism itself. Again, Marx insisted that human nature is plastic and formed primarily by the needs of economic structures that reign in turn but are doomed to evaporate in time. The only ineradicable human yearning is our lust for unalienated labor during which we fulfill our species-being.15 For Marxists, our species-being—our individual and collective human fulfillment—centers on productive activity that is free, social, challenging, stimulating, and transformative. We need to develop our highest creative potentials, choose our own productive paths, engage other people in the process or results of our labors, find work that energizes our talents, and

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thereby change our environment and ourselves for the better. Marxism’s minimalist view of species-being includes the conviction that human fulfillment is intimately linked to the imaginative, unshackled use of productive capabilities. Labor is a distinctively human activity and overflows with value and significance. Only through free, creative activity can people realize their unalienated, species-being. Imagine an artist, fully absorbed by what she is doing, who gains immense fulfillment from the process of creation, with full control over what she is designing. The gratified artist is working hard in the sense of investing enormous energy in her task, but she is so deeply engaged in her project that leisure time and passive distractions are unappealing. Her strenuous activity fills her soul. To labor for its own sake from passionate commitment is to experience unalienated work and to nurture speciesbeing. We fully invest energy as a means of self-expression and selfcreation. Marxism relentlessly charges that under capitalism workers are at the mercy of the small number of owners. The capitalist holders of the means of production dictate what is produced, how it will be produced, and what will happen after it is produced. The worker becomes a mere appendage, an instrument of production whose creativity is suffocated. Such workers, enjoying few if any other opportunities, toil only to satisfy survival needs. Their species-being shrivels from lack of nourishment.

Exploitation Understood broadly, “exploitation” arises when someone uses another person merely as an object for his own benefit, when he ignores the humanity of that person by treating the person as merely a means to his own ends. Understood in a narrower, Marxist sense, exploitation transpires when one class, the workers, produces surplus value that is wrongly controlled by another class, the capitalist owners. This sort of exploitation does not flow from explicit duress, physical threat, or other noneconomic force. Instead, capitalists leverage their enormously superior economic bargaining power over workers—their ownership of the means of production and the absence of real alternatives for workers—to exploit their employees. Capitalists siphon the surplus value produced by the labor of the working class. They purchase workers’ labor at its value, which is equal to a subsistence wage, and sell products at their value. Because the value workers create is greater than the value of labor power itself, surplus value sprouts. But workers do not receive the labor equivalent of what they produce. Also, workers’ labor is “forced” in the sense that only limited and

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equally exhausting alternatives are available for workers who must satisfy their subsistence needs. Put simply, workers benefit owners; owners economically force, in the relevant Marxist sense, workers to supply that benefit, and owners wrongfully do not bestow equal, reciprocal benefits to workers. Classical Marxism argues that the ways human beings think about, perceive, and experience their world (“ideological superstructure”) are “determined” by the economic structures that surround them (“economic base’). Economic structures, other than communism, are riddled with internal contradictions: they contain the seeds of their own destruction. These internal contradictions are conflicting requirements that an economic structure must fulfill to continue to survive. To forestall their inevitable demise, economic structures must invade the consciousness of the masses and present themselves as necessary and natural. Thus, the survival needs of economic structures mold much of how we think about, perceive, and experience the world. Let us return to the previous example. Capitalism requires workers and owners who are competitive, economically aggressive within rules, and motivated by material incentives. Capitalism rewards such behaviors. Most people, responding to positive reinforcement, accept the goals of capitalism as their own. Our ideologies reflect what we observe. The dominant ideologies—spread by politics, philosophy, literature, popular media, and the like—bray the message that most people are naturally, perhaps inevitably, competitive, economically aggressive within rules, and motivated by material incentives. Once these views solidify into commonsense, they produce a supposedly independent reason to cling to capitalism: only capitalism conforms to fundamental human nature. In this manner, ideological superstructure mystifies reality and deepens our conviction that human beings are inherently self-interested, perhaps even selfish.

Self-realization For Marx, genuine self-realization is not grounded in material consumption. Instead, human fulfillment requires the full, free actualization and externalization of our higher creative capabilities. We need to actualize our higher creative potentials and refine further our actualized capabilities. To externalize our higher creative capabilities our talents must become observable to the public. Unlike alienated work, unalienated labor becomes more enjoyable and fulfilling with repetition. Marx insists that the antidote for economic exploitation and alienation is the arrival of communism, which he takes to be the final form of eco-

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nomics and society. But we need not buy a ticket on Marx’s socialist bandwagon in order to extract legitimate insights from his writing. He reminds us that to a significant extent we become what we do. How we expend our creative energies greatly influences the people that we are becoming. Our jobs are not merely peripheral to our lives. His distinction between alienated work and unalienated labor resonates with our intuitions and experiences. We have all luxuriated in unalienated labor that was strenuous and challenging, but fulfilling. We have all endured alienated work that was sheer drudgery and crushingly banal regardless of material reward. Independently of whether we are convinced by Marx’s politics or his notion of species-being, he identifies a paramount aspect of structuring a meaningful, valuable human life: we must discover an outlet for our creativity that will promote our self-realization. But can any activity or any goal if reached provide final fulfillment for human beings? The Sisyphus-like remorseless reiterations of everyday life haunt our inquiry. Even if we access unalienated production and nurture our higher creative capabilities; even if we bask in friendship and amplify our subjectivities in erotic love; and even if we lead mostly authentic lives that embody concern for others, honor, and justified self-pride—will that be enough? Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) dryly observes that attaining all of the desiderata outlined is insufficient. Because of the nature of human desire and the lack of intrinsically valuable objects, human beings are doomed to endless striving on a pendulum of frustration and disappointment. We can never achieve final fulfillment and the more deeply we engage life the more execrable will be our inevitable misery.

15. Seek Fulfillment: Arthur Schopenhauer “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.” ʊHenry David Thoreau

Schopenhauer’s outlook was pessimistic.16 Human life is beset with universal, unavoidable suffering which prevents fulfillment of basic needs and wants. Life itself, not merely mortality and fear of death, renders human existence problematic. Although our world of appearance yields the illusion of individuation, Reality, as thing-in-itself, is a primal unity without individual parts. Our notions of space, time, and causality are functions of the way the human mind actively shapes and organizes sensory material, they have no independent existence as substances or categories of Real-

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ity. For Schopenhauer, individuality itself is a grand illusion. Life is a totality to which all creatures belong as expression of a oneness in flux. We are aware of ourselves as self-moving and active, as direct expressers of wills. Schopenhauer took this inner consciousness to be basic and irreducible. What we will and what we do are one phenomenon viewed from the different vantage points of inner consciousness and body, respectively. He extended his notion of will, seeing it as definitive of the fundamental character of the universe, in order to undermine those who insisted on the underlying rationality and morality of the cosmos. Schopenhauer tried to reorient philosophy away from the dominant rationalism of his day to greater emphasis on unconscious, biological forces. He denies the inevitability of human progress and the perfectibility of people. He insists that human beings are doomed to an eternal round of torment and misery. The nature of human striving, the lack of intrinsically valuable objects, and the banal repetitions of daily life ensure that we can never attain final fulfillment. Without final fulfillment we are condemned to ongoing boredom, frustration, and disappointment punctuated by short intervals of elation.

The futility of striving Striving is the basic nature of the will, and no finished project can end striving. We desire and conjure goals that we think will satisfy our desires. If we fail to attain our ends we are frustrated. When we succeed in reaching our goals we enjoy immediate, but brief, exhilaration. Soon thereafter, we are disappointed because reaching our goal does not redeem our lives or bring lasting fulfillment. Reaching a goal robs it of its allure. We can no longer imagine how wonderful attaining our end will be. Pervasive boredom descends upon us. So we formulate new goals based on new desires and drearily oscillate on the pendulum whose end points are frustration and disappointment. Because striving is incapable of final serenity, we alternate between the lack of fulfillment we feel when not achieving temporary goals and the sense of letdown and boredom we feel when we attain them. This sketches the pendulum of frustration and disappointment to which human beings have been sentenced. Aside from startling exceptions, whom Schopenhauer derides as “decoy birds,” human beings struggle mightily for spiritual fulfillment but must fail. The decoy bird metaphor is instructive. Decoy birds lure others—we see a few seemingly happy souls and foolishly imagine special possibilities for ourselves. Decoy birds are also wooden and lifeless. The spectacularly few among us who attain that level of fulfillment we dub

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“happiness” are the dullest among us—simpletons who dwell among illusions and fantasies, too ignorant to perceive reality for what it is. For those of us sensitive and intelligent enough to see reality starkly, Schopenhauer sneers that life is a business that does not cover its expenses. Schopenhauer offers only a glimmer of hope. The best among us can mollify the pain by redirecting our wills. Abstract philosophical contemplation, creativity and aesthetic enjoyments, and moderating bodily appetites that fuel the will’s striving can lighten our load. Such projects, counsels Schopenhauer, allow us to be disinterested spectators of life instead of participants swinging on its torturous pendulum. Our existence is most fulfilling when we perceive it least and when we distance ourselves from striving. But, even here, the finer aspects of life require talent reserved only for a highly refined few. The price for such intellectual power and refined sensitivity is greater vulnerability to deep suffering. Schopenhauer offers us a glimpse of his own soul when he concludes that the most gifted among us are the loneliest because they experience their difference most acutely. Schopenhauer advises, along with the Buddhists, that we should minimize our attachments to and withdraw as much as possible from this life. Despite the dreariness of his account of human life, Schopenhauer brings a kernel of insight: once we attain a goal we often find it less fulfilling than we had imagined. The experience of “Is that all there is?” is common. No single accomplishment, however greatly desired, will redeem our lives once and forever upon being attained. Schopenhauer’s truth, then, is that no attained goal can end human striving, which is therefore incapable of final satisfaction. All human desire is based on our needs and no intrinsically valuable objects are available to us. Accordingly, Schopenhauer recommends complete resignation: by renouncing our needbased desires (much as Buddhism advises) we can soften the curse of the pendulum and ease our misery. Schopenhauer, then, takes the impossibility of final fulfillment, an enduring contentment in which nothing remains to be desired, to be the bane of human existence. Because we seem condemned to exhaust our lives on the tedious, ultimately pointless pendulum of desire, we are unable to fulfill our deepest yearnings. Until our deaths, another desire, another pursuit, another ultimately unsatisfying result always loom on the horizon. Life permits no final resting point.

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Process values Although Schopenhauer registers some valuable insights, his conclusions are fatally flawed. For example, Nietzsche agrees that final fulfillment is impossible for human beings, but insists that this is good news. For within the process and the journey are embedded the deepest meaning and value available to human beings. Nietzsche tries to distance himself from Schopenhauer, but his own views on suffering, the pervasiveness of will, the lack of final resolutions, the role of strife, and the contingency of individuation owe much to Schopenhauer’s work. Nietzsche, however, extols the grand striver while Schopenhauer advises withdrawal. The difference between these two thinkers can be illustrated by the Myth of Sisyphus. Schopenhauer would counsel Sisyphus to withdraw from his task of endlessly pushing the boulder up a hill, and, failing that possibility, to detach himself from the chore as he performs it. Nietzsche would advise Sisyphus to affirm his fate, to desire nothing more than to do what he is fated to do eternally, to luxuriate in the immediate texture of what he does, to confer, through attitude and will, meaning on an inherently meaningless task. The strategy of withdrawal, aspects of which appear in Schopenhauer, Buddhism, and Nietzsche’s image of the last man, is a paralyzing, pessimistic inertia resulting from acknowledging inherent cosmic purposelessness. Withdrawal is sometimes accompanied by the belief that life embodies no good, or that the path of least resistance and minimal effort is a prescribed response to the human condition: avoiding suffering, striving for banal contentment and easy acceptance become paramount. The image of the grand striver, gleefully espoused by Nietzsche, accepts inherent cosmic purposelessness as the springboard to creative possibilities: reveling in radical contingency; embracing the human condition fully while recognizing its tragic dimensions; understanding the process of deconstruction, reimagination, and re-creation; and rejoicing in liberation from imposed values and meanings. The grand striver places paramount value on this life. The best of us bay “amor fati” at the moon through thick and thin. As described earlier, Nietzsche perceives the will to power as a second-order, master desire to confront and overcome resistance in the pursuit of first-order, specific desires. The will to power requires resistance and confrontation with obstacles. Once a first-order desire is fulfilled, the will to power is both temporarily satisfied (it achieved its first-order goal) and dissatisfied (it no longer has the resistance and confrontation it requires). So the will to power will seek a new first-order desire to pursue.

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Much of this account seems to track Schopenhauer’s description of the pendulum of desire. But whereas Schopenhauer draws strikingly dire conclusions about the human condition, Nietzsche relishes what he takes to be the genuine source of a more profound version of human happiness. Schopenhauer is convinced that final fulfillment is the deepest human yearning; that the satisfaction of all our first-order desires requires that all resistance has been overcome or has vanished. Nietzsche insists that the will to power, our master second-order desire, requires the impossibility of final fulfillment. That is, the will to power cannot desire the state of final fulfillment. To put it metaphorically, if final fulfillment is attained then the will to power is out of business. The ongoing process of confronting and struggling with obstacles in the course of pursuing first-order desires is a necessary feature of a good human life because it is required by our master, second-order desire: the will to power. As we undertake the journey characterized by exercising our wills to power we grow and selfovercome; we craft our selves. Contra Schopenhauer, Nietzsche insists that the will to power is incompatible with final, permanent fulfillment of all first-order desires. Our deepest yearning, then, is not final fulfillment but the increase of our power and the refinement of our selves as we exercise robustly our wills to power. Ongoing activity, not the realization of a final state of being, is our deepest urge. Enhanced power and self-realization, not contentment or final serenity, are our greatest values. Schopenhauer fails to see that value and meaning need not be permanent to be real; that process renders fulfillments independently of attaining goals; that the products of great effort and creativity do not instantaneously force emptiness; that suffering is not inherently negative but can be transfigured for creative advantage.

The continuity of means and ends Schopenhauer claims human desire is unquenchable. Much like Plato’s tyrannical man, we create new desires soon after we fulfill earlier desires. We always want more regardless of how many desires we fulfill. Thus we are frustrated either by failure to fulfill our desires, or we are bored once we fulfill them, or we are creating new desires that lead to the same selfdefeating alternatives. What is the state to which Schopenhauer aspires? Does he secretly yearn for a condition of never-ending bliss? Does freedom from suffering require that we want nothing more? Many would find such a life deadening. A life devoid of new projects, adventures, journeys, and goals lacks

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creativity: bland contentment replaces vigorous thought and action. Perhaps suffering is produced not by the process of seeking fulfillment of new desires but by the taming of our desire-creating mechanism. Having unfulfilled desires need not be painful; it is often exhilarating. We imagine rewarding new situations and pursue them vigorously. We find fulfillments in the process and, often, in achieving the goal. Our insatiability ensures that we continue to imagine and pursue rewarding projects, rather than being limited to contemplating earlier fulfillments. We are able to project to a future of potentially greater meaning and value. Whether the new desires we create produce suffering depends on what they are and how we pursue them, not solely on their presence. A crude dualism infects Schopenhauer’s analysis. He separates human experience into desires and results. Human beings desire what they lack or what they seek more of. This sense of deprivation itself is a type of suffering. When we act to attain our desires we either fail or we succeed. If we fail we deepen our suffering. If we succeed in attaining our goal we may experience temporary satisfaction. This satisfaction, however, is soon followed by boredom. Our striving, willful nature cannot find contentment. The crudeness of Schopenhauer’s dualism lies in his categories. Human life is not experienced as a series of discrete pursuits of isolated goals. The process of striving itself yields satisfactions independently of attaining its goals. Upon being attained, goals propel us to new projects. Boredom results from inactivity, a loss of faith in life, and a lack of imagination. But human beings live in a continuous process of desires, finding appropriate means of satisfying those desires, and failing to achieve or attaining the ends we seek. As a continuous process, the categories of desires, means, and ends are fluid. What is called an end in relation to a particular means is itself a means to another end. What is an end with respect to a particular desire is itself a desire leading to pursuit of another end. The continuous process, at its best, energizes our spirit, manifests our faith in life, and reveals our imagination. Schopenhauer talks of our incessant striving as if it were a disease to be eradicated through withdrawal. But human beings are not static characters trying to find a fixed point called “contentment.” If contentment suggests inactivity, a final termination, or a mere savoring of the past then it does conjure terminal boredom or retreat from the world. If we understand contentment more robustly we will underscore its compatibility with continuous activity and self-creation. Contentment is not a final resting point, but a positive self-appraisal: an acknowledgment that we are on the proper course, a savoring of the past seasoned with hope for the future, a satisfaction with the self we are creating. Schopenhauer failed to understand that

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if we create an endless supply of rewarding projects, our lack of final satisfaction bears joyous tidings. Although outcomes are relevant to our well-being, the meaning of human life emerges from the sheer exuberance of participating. The chance to maximize our physical talents whatever they may be; the experience of casting our energies into the world in service of a project in which we invest then glean meaning and value; and the connection to and appreciation for life that resonates within us as we throw ourselves into our chosen tasks. Nietzsche celebrates increased power, understood as the overcoming of resistance in pursuit of first-order desires. He scorns the pursuit of pleasure as such. Pleasure may be gained without struggling with obstacles and without engaging what Nietzsche takes to be higher human attributes. Thus, he sputters, “Man does not strive for pleasure; only the Englishman [British utilitarian] does” (TI, “Maxims and Arrows,” 12). Because popular opinion often connects the pursuit of pleasure with forging a meaningful life, we must examine Nietzsche’s conclusions on these matters more closely. How valuable is attaining pleasure as such? Should human life focus mainly on hedonistic concerns? Can a human life be, on balance, highly pleasurable but only minimally meaningful? Would reflective human beings choose to live a less pleasurable, but robustly significant and valuable life instead of a more pleasurable, but less significant and valuable life? To address such questions, we now turn to the work of contemporary philosopher, Robert Nozick (1938-2002).

16. Evaluate Pleasure and Ponder Meaning: Robert Nozick “He that loves pleasure must for pleasure fall.” ʊChristopher Marlowe

Nozick illustrates important dimensions of the relationship between experience and value. He imagines an experience machine that could give us any experience we desire.17 In such an environment, our brains could be stimulated so we would think and feel that we were winning the Nobel Prize, having dinner with our favorite celebrity, breaking Barry Bonds’ home-run record, engaging in a torrid love affair with the person of our dreams, or anything else we want to experience. All the while we would be floating in a tank with electrodes attached to our brains. We could, if we wished, plug into the machine for life and program our entire life’s experiences. Or we could program some time out of the tank every two

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years or so to select the experiences for the next period of our lives. While in the tank we will not know we are there. We will think it is all actually happening. Assuming all other logistics could be resolved (for example, a team to monitor the tank, ways to fulfill our nutrition needs, required medical care, arranging the blissful death that must eventually come), would we choose to enter the tank for an extended period? The issue is what, if anything, matters to us beyond pleasurable experiences, beyond how our lives feel. In an age of developing virtual realities, Nozick’s thought experiment is less bizarre than might first seem. He argues that we would reject the experience machine for at least three reasons. First, actually doing things is more important to us than merely having the sensations of doing them. More matters to us than merely how our lives feel from within. Second, we want to become a certain type of person, not simply float in a tank as a bland receptacle of sensations: “Plugging into the machine is a kind of suicide. It will seem to some, trapped by a picture, that nothing about what we are like can matter except as it gets reflected in our experiences. But should it be surprising that what we are is important to us?”18 Third, the experience machine limits us to an artificial reality which prevents actual contact with any deeper reality. The experience machine lives our lives for us, instead of helping us live our own lives. However sophisticated we imagine the machine, its major function is to remove us from reality and prevent us from making any difference in the world. Accordingly, Nozick concludes, with Nietzsche, that we should not assess a life based merely on its accumulated pleasurable experiences.

Pleasure and value Nozick’s experience machine example suggests that gaining massive quantities of pleasure is not automatically a great good, especially when doing so depends on being disconnected from reality. Consider another case: A mature, intelligent woman enjoys a reasonably meaningful and valuable life. Her hedonistic calculus is significantly positive: she enjoys significantly more pleasure than she endures pain. She then suffers a horrible car accident. She goes immediately into shock and experiences little, if any, pain. The good news is that she survives and will live a normal life span. The bad news is that her mental capabilities are and will remain those of a seven-year-old child. However, from a hedonistic standpoint, additional good news ensues: She has heightened capability for pleasure and is desensitized to pain, and wins friends easily. Her hedonistic calculus is and will remain throughout her life overwhelmingly positive. Sup-

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pose further that she has no recollection of her accident or life prior to the accident. Would we judge her accident a benefit? Obviously not, but a hedonist may have to. If this is true, so much the worse for hedonism. The woman does not and cannot experience her new lifestyle as harm to her; on the contrary, she luxuriates in amplified pleasure. Yet she has clearly been harmed by the accident, and she would have agreed if a similar hypothetical had been posed to her prior to the auto crash. The victim’s life is much different from what it would have been but for the accident, even though the victim is unaware of the change. That she experiences a greater overall balance of pleasure over pain as a result of the accident is small consolation for what she has lost. By evaluating good and evil, and harm and benefit only by experienced sensations, hedonism wildly miss the mark. A person may be harmed even though she does not experience negative (painful) sensations; and she may be harmed even though her balance of pleasure over pain has increased. Moreover, she is not automatically harmed simply because she experiences negative sensations. The expression “no pain, no gain” bears currency. As Nietzsche propounds: confronting daunting obstacles, challenging struggles, and arduous tasks are painful activities but nevertheless crucial for positive self-transformation. Such transformation cannot accurately or automatically be measured by increased overall pleasure. Perhaps hedonism can resuscitate its plausibility by claiming, for example, that pleasure is more valuable when grounded in truth and reality than when garnered from illusion, virtual reality, and falsity. Thus, the value of pleasure accumulated in an experience machine must be reduced or even dismissed. While this strategy might at first seem wise, it is unsuccessful for at least four reasons: it introduces a new dimension into the hedonistic calculus—independent value—which determines that pleasure as such cannot be the measure of value; what constitutes value would determine which pleasures are worthy and would thus be more important than amassing pleasure as such; the pure hedonist could not stop at adding only considerations of truth and reality as adjustments, but would have to amend pure hedonism in the light of different counterexamples (such as that of the woman in the car accident); and this series of ad hoc maneuvers would eventually overwhelm the theory. By that I mean that instead of a pure hedonism that celebrates the accumulation of pleasure as the greatest good and highest value we would end up only with the disappointing, commonplace conclusion (from a hedonistic perspective) that attaining pleasure is one among several goods and values, and not the most important of these.

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Accordingly, rejecting the use of an experience machine that encloses us within a frame-work of just our own experiences, implies at least two conclusions. First, we should also reject pure hedonism, the view that pleasure is intrinsically good and perhaps the greatest good. We could attain a life of maximum pleasure and minimum pain in the experience machine, but most of us would reject that alternative because we value some things more than pleasurable sensations: a connection to reality; actually engaging in and pursuing projects, interests, and purposes, not merely having simulated experiences of doing so; crafting the people we are becoming; and contacting a deeper reality. Second, to evaluate the degree of meaningfulness of a human life we must access people, things, and values beyond individual experiences and accumulated sensations. Nozick takes meaning in life to involve transcending our limits. The narrow and more restrictive the limits of a life, the less meaningful it is. The more intensely people are involved and the more they transcend their limits, the more meaningful their lives are. These astute observations will energize much of the argument that follows.

Faith and meaning Living robustly requires faith. Faith is not the opposite of reason, nor is it devoid of reason, nor is it distinctively religious. By “faith,” I mean conviction, choice, and action not fully supportable or determined by reason. Faith is necessary because human reason is limited. On fundamental questions of human existence reason is incapable of supplying a clear answer. Yet we must arrive at and act on positions on these questions. But faith is unsafe and uncertain. Faith is not won once and forever, but must be renewed. We can lose our faith in life. Losing our faith in life involves seriously questioning life’s meaning. When we question life’s meaning seriously we are not entertaining an abstract, philosophical puzzle. Instead, we are psychologically and viscerally out of tune with life’s rhythms. We feel that life lacks meaning. The causes of this feeling are varied. To name a few: loss of a loved one; failure of our major projects; onset of serious illness; clinical depression; disappointment that our successes leave us feeling hollow; and philosophical paralysis. Philosophical paralysis can result from preoccupation with the cosmic perspective, a vantage point from afar that shrinks the significance of all human activity and accomplishment. Human beings have within them always the possibility of evaluating their actions and results from the standpoint of an Ideal Observer perched far above the globe and firmly embed-

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ded in the cosmic perspective. From this position, human activity, despite its frenetic hustle and bustle, lacks significance. The process of becoming philosophically paralyzed typically includes three stages. First, we reject religion and embrace cosmic meaninglessness: we conclude that there is no meaning built into the cosmos. Second, we undermine the importance of human life by viewing it from a wider context which contains and dwarfs human achievements. Typically, this involves ascending to the cosmic perspective and focusing on the impermanence, limitations, and ultimate insignificance of an individual life and human life taken as a whole. Third, we conclude that either human life is absurd or irredeemably futile. Once lost, there is no sure-fire way to regain faith. Psychologists struggle to reenergize clients suffering from the loss of a loved one, failure of major projects, onset of serious illness, clinical depression, and other disappointments. But philosophers must struggle with loss of faith caused by philosophical paralysis. Psychological crisis, then, occurs when we lose our ability to shift among perspectives, when the two major opposing vantage points (the personal perspective and the cosmic perspective) press upon us with equal force, or when we are mired in the cosmic perspective. We are either paralyzed by equilibrium of conflicting forces or we are radically disengaged from life. Our loss of will is fueled by a loss of faith. A sense of meaning is restored only if we can re-engage a personal perspective in which we can identify what we are doing with our own desires, and in which our energies and enthusiasms are re-connected to creative labor. False satisfactions may sustain a false sense of but do not constitute meaning. Meaning, then, cannot be purely a subjective matter: believing that my life has meaning cannot guarantee that it does; nor is meaning a purely objective matter. We are never in a neutral position to evaluate our perceptions and beliefs against the world as such. Our interpretations are within the realm of our experiences of the world, and we cannot transcend to a point outside the world and therein appeal to an entirely atheoretical perception of pure, uninterpreted states of affairs. The realm of truth is within the realms of experience, reason, and emotion. Human beings do not have access to truth or knowledge outside those realms. Although no single, fixed position that could freeze truth claims and sanctify interpretations once and forever is accessible to us that does not imply that all interpretations or all perspectives are equally sound. I may be connected to value, contribute to a wide network of relationships, and be deeply appreciated by my society, but if I lack the feelings, attitudes, intentions, and beliefs appropriate to my situation, my sense of meaninglessness will be acute. People may also accept that their lives are

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meaningful by the usual standards, yet feel that their lives are pointless. Such people have the correct set of beliefs about their situation but still lack the internal animation, the zest, necessary to experience their lives as meaningful. If a philosopher comes along and informs me that my life is objectively meaningful even though I sense it as subjectively meaningless, I am unlikely to leap for joy. Under such circumstances, I have lost my faith but kept my life.

Navigating perspectives Three strategies can soften the effects of philosophical paralysis and psychological crisis: (1) reinstating religious belief, (2) embracing pictorial symmetry, and (3) using the cosmic perspective for practical advantage. 1. Reinstating religious belief. If human beings could connect with an unlimited reality that is itself intrinsically meaningful then our lives would be neither meaningless nor ungrounded. A sense of purpose would emerge from our freely chosen role in a grand epic or our eventual triumphant entrance into a grander, eternal world. Here we either adopt an AurelianHegelian approach or accept a version of western or eastern theism. 2. Pictorial symmetry. Images emerging from the cosmic perspective necessarily shrink human achievements and life. As a view from afar, the cosmic vantage point renders its objects puny and insignificant. But pictorial accuracy requires symmetry, an adjustment for scale. A meaningful human life does not require what seems significant from the cosmic perspective, but requires only what is significant from a human perspective. Put differently: if human life seems puny from a cosmic perspective then only puny meaning is required to close the gap of disproportionality between serious human effort and result.19 Philosophical paralysis from preoccupation with the cosmic perspective results only from distortion: demanding massive, cosmically significant meaning to redeem human life. 3. Using the cosmic perspective for practical advantage. Instead of taking the cosmic perspective as another limitation on human experience, perhaps we can use it for practical advantage. By ascending in imagination to a larger context, we can usefully “put things in perspective” when appropriate. To lighten our suffering when we suffer grave loss, take ourselves and our projects too seriously, or feel overwhelmed, we can view our life from the cosmic perspective and shrink our problems. By moving artfully between the cosmic and human perspective and intermediary contexts, perhaps we can maximize our triumphs and minimize our failures. Stepping back from what is happening and viewing as if from the outside,

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to be an observer of our own lives, to detach ourselves temporarily from events creatively uses the cosmic perspective. The cosmic perspective, if used uncreatively, shrinks our lives, underscores the triviality of our projects, mocks our pretensions, and broadcasts our insignificance. Macbeth’s soliloquy is the best literary summary of the horrors of immersion in the cosmic perspective: “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player/That struts and frets his hour upon the stage/And then is heard no more. It is a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, /Signifying nothing” (Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5). In contrast, the personal perspective inflates our lives, amplifies the process and results of our projects, encourages our pretensions, and demands that we see ourselves as highly significant. The vast discrepancy between the personal and cosmic perspectives can be bridged by intermediary perspectives. Global, national, communal, and familial perspectives, among others, are available. Part of the secret of life is to move artfully among these perspectives. Consider the expression “this, too, shall pass.” Although having religious origins, the phrase is offered by even nontheists as a condolence.20 The point of the offer is to ease suffering. As a positive reminder that the occasion for suffering is cosmically less important than it momentarily seems and that time moderates most pain, the phrase advises the sufferer to see the event from a broader perspective. However, the phrase is not offered because of its cognitive content that in a finite life all transitory things perish. Instead, we utter the expression for practical advantage: to provide consolation to the sufferer and to ease pain. For example, imagine that your best friends have achieved an extraordinary goal which they have pursued with great effort for a long time. They have won the Nobel Prize, found true love, published their first book, accepted glorious jobs, or given birth to greatly desired babies. Upon hearing this wonderful news, you tell them “this, too, shall pass.” From a cognitive standpoint, the phrase is just as true now as in the case of the sufferer. But, unless we are classical Stoics, it is hideously inappropriate. Your friends would wonder about your motives. Are you trying to destroy their joy? Are you expressing your resentment, envy, or jealousy? Are you really their friend? While the cognitive value of the expression is stable, its practical and moral values vary. Uttered as condolence, the phrase is often an appropriate attempt to lessen pain by broadening perspective. Uttered after great achievement, the phrase is an inappropriate attempt to trample joy by broadening perspective. By selecting perspectives for appropriate purposes we can soften the pinch of the tragedy of human life. I am not counseling a

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simpleminded use of perspectives: utter “this, too, shall pass” at every tragedy, while giddily relishing and inflating every personal triumph. Tragedies should be met by an appropriate measure of grief and sorrow, but no more. Triumphs should be appreciated by an appropriate amount of joy and self-celebration, but no more. What is the appropriate measure? Finding the correct amount, like applying Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean, is the province of people of practical wisdom. Individual differences in temperament and circumstance preclude a single, simple answer for everyone.

Absurdity re-visited Once we are aware of the gap between cosmic and personal perspectives it is doubtful that human life is truly absurd. Living our lives in full light of the various perspectives from which they can be viewed need not produce any ridiculous incongruity, extreme irrationality, striking disharmony, or unrealistic pretension. Our situation is not absurd once we are able to adjust perspectives appropriately. The idea that human life is absurd depends on our own pretensions and expectations. If we pretend that the cosmic perspective is illusory then our actions within the personal perspective may seem absurd because they take themselves to be more than they are. But this pretension is not inevitable. Once we reflect on the two perspectives and recognize their presence we can still act vigorously. We can act vitally within the personal perspective while later retreating to the cosmic vantage point to place our actions “in perspective.” Doing so is neither absurd nor pretentious; it is living life fully, with faith and humility, combining engagement with reflection. Absurdity in the popular sense connotes incongruity, ridiculousness, or extreme silliness—an enormous gap between reasonable expectations and result. Do we have any reasonable expectation that human life should be other than it is? How could we have such an expectation given that the history of our planet records no alternative? Granted, we might desire that human life be enhanced in some way or other. But having an ungrounded desire that falls far short of a reasonable expectation is not an ingredient of absurdity. I may desire to wake up tomorrow morning and find myself to be 30 years younger, more intelligent, and stronger. But tomorrow when I awake and discover myself as I am today I can hardly conclude that I am a victim of the absurd. My desire to find myself transformed was not a reasonable expectation that could be frustrated by an indifferent universe. In my judgment, existential invocations of “absurdity” are overly dramatic and

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false because they assume that human life should be other than what it is. However, that assumption has no more basis in reality than does my hypothetical desire to awake tomorrow radically transformed. If anything is absurd it is my unreasonable expectation, which can presumably be altered. The supposed gap between my yearning and the result yielded by the cosmos is not absurd. If we are deeply absorbed in a project we operate from within a personal perspective; the cosmic perspective fades away, at least for the period of engagement. We do not simultaneously invest great energy, concern, and passion into a project and judge it ultimately pointless. We need not and typically do not claim our creations embody ultimate value even after the investment we have expended in the process of creation. No inflated claim exists for the cosmic perspective to return and debunk. Thus no necessary absurdity plagues human life. We can ignore the problem, unless we are already aware of it, or we can reconceive the problem creatively for practical advantage. What is for Camus and other theorists of absurdity a problem can be seen as another avenue for human possibility. By creatively transforming the problem into an opportunity, we exemplify the meaning in life the problem supposedly calls into question.

Telescopes and pogo sticks When considering life as a whole we should be wary of the images emerging from the cosmic perspective. Viewing human activity from the vast expanse of a cosmic perspective ungenerously shrinks our achievements. Just as viewing a building from afar with a telescope or taking a photo from a wide-angle lens renders the structure small and insignificant, so too placing human activity in a cosmic framework lures us into comparisons with Sisyphus. But fairness, perhaps pictorial accuracy, requires symmetry. We should not demand cosmic significance to redeem human lives that are being viewed from an otherworldly cosmic perspective. We would not measure the size of a building from a photo without adjusting for scale. Likewise, when minimizing human activity from a cosmic perspective we should recognize that a meaningful human life does not require what seems significant from that perspective. A meaningful human life requires what is significant from a human perspective. To think otherwise is like seeing a photo of a building and concluding the structure measures three inches by five inches. Questions about the significance of death, the meaning or meaninglessness of life, and the importance or unimportance of our lives must be filtered through perspectives. But which is the better, even the supreme

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perspective? To answer this question is to answer the other, more pressing, questions of life and death. My answer will disappoint those with a low tolerance for ambiguity, those overwhelmed by the imperatives of binary logic, and those appalled by conflict. My answer is that both the cosmic and personal perspectives, and those in between, are genuine. Neither can claim independent superiority over the other. Our choice of perspective, then, becomes crucial for our understanding and enjoyment of life. Life is like a telescope in that we can increase or decrease the magnification, adjust the focus, and view our lives from numerous vantage points. The most artistic and graceful among us travel lightly among the available perspectives, never seeing one as providing the only authentic answers to life’s questions. Those of us who live the most meaningful, significant, valuable, and happy lives choose the perspective most appropriate for such lives more consistently than those who lead lives that seem less meaningful, significant, valuable and happy. The presence of multiple perspectives at first blush increases the conflict, turmoil, and struggle within us. But it also offers opportunities for enriching our lives. Creatively using the cosmic, personal, and intermediary perspectives follows ancient wisdom: nurture the most beneficial attitude given a situation. Although harmony among perspectives is unavailable, thus rendering our lives both more tragic and comedic, the only alternatives are stunningly unappealing: full immersion in the personal perspective at the cost of reflection, or full immersion in the cosmic perspective at the cost of vibrancy. The lack of reflection transforms human life toward the bestial, while the lack of vibrancy paralyzes action and breeds clinical depression. Sartre offers better advice: we are condemned to our freedom. The meaning of life is embedded in life itself, in our instincts and drives. Through our emotional life we experience the meaning in life. Through our reason we connect our lives to wider values that produce meaning. Creativity is not merely producing something somewhat original. Creativity is a self-examination and self-exploration that affects the creator. Creative activity involves self-transformation. But shifting perspectives is not an easy cure for our insecurities. We will still feel the hot breath of nothingness on our necks; experience bafflement before darkness; anxiety when confronting the limits of rationality; and surprise before the serendipity of the universe. Awe and wonder will never evaporate. But neither will dread and trembling. Our lives are also like pogo sticks. We bound from goal to goal as each satisfaction impels us to new imaginings and pursuits. Although we take time to savor our accomplishments, we are excited by the process and con-

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tinue the quest. Nietzsche’s deconstruction-reimagination-recreation is the vivid exemplar of this propulsion. Although it can be reasonably criticized as not including sufficient respite and enough time to savor, Nietzsche’s process nevertheless highlights the deficiencies of viewing life as a simple journey to a particular, fixed goal. The impossibility of final fulfillment on earth is our glory, not our persecution. Creatively using perspectives is not a flight from life, but a method of squeezing the most out of it. The cosmic perspective is not a safe oasis outside of life, but a vantage point reflective human beings invariably entertain. We are not editing out the hard parts of life, but interpreting them such that we retain our faith and boost our spirits. In my judgment, then, meaningful human lives can be described by the metaphors of telescopes and pogo sticks. Moreover, a robustly meaningful life is not automatically a life bursting with a surfeit of pleasure. But, perhaps, a state of mind related to but distinct from the sensation of pleasure should be considered: happiness. How great a personal good is happiness? Is the happy life automatically the good life? Should increasing our personal happiness and the happiness of others be the paramount goal of human life? On the contrary, I will argue that in an important sense happiness is overrated.

17. Assess Happiness: Raymond Angelo Belliotti “God doesn’t necessarily want us to be happy. He wants us to be lovable. Worthy of love.” —William Nicholson

With the exception of love, no human experience is celebrated more than happiness. We pursue wealth, success, honor, relationships, education, and the like because we believe they will lead to our happiness. Parents often say that what they want most for their children is happiness. The intuition is clear: our accomplishments, careers, relationships, the potentials we realize, are hollow if they do not make us happy.21 However, throughout the history of philosophy, different definitions of “happiness,” explanations of appropriate recipes for attaining happiness, and accounts of why these recipes make human beings happy abound. Until we understand precisely what someone means by “happiness,” we cannot begin to answer the major questions: Is happiness attainable? If so, how might we attain it? How great a personal good is happiness? Are the best lives necessarily happy lives? Is happiness necessary for a good life, a meaningful life, a worthwhile life? Does it matter how we achieve happiness?

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The popular understanding of “happiness” is merely introspective and descriptive, an accurate self-report of a person’s predominantly positive state of mind. If I report truthfully and accurately that I am happy—that I have a relatively enduring positive state of mind such as peace or exuberance—then I am happy. Happiness does not include a necessary normative element. This understanding of happiness is our prevalent cultural rendering and finds support in contemporary philosophical and psychological literature.22 While happiness so conceived is easily understood, its consequences are often ignored. Under the contemporary understanding, happiness cannot be the greatest personal good, is often not a great good, and is sometimes not a good at all. The following examples are designed to illustrate that truth.

The successful immoralist While the possibilities of a thoroughly depraved, moral monster enjoying extended peace or exuberance are slim, morally unworthy people can attain the relatively enduring positive psychological state required for the contemporary understanding of happiness. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) argued that the morally unworthy do not deserve happiness, and that being morally worthy is a greater good than the happiness enjoyed by the unworthy villain.23 He was correct, at least insofar as the happiness of the villain is derived from unworthy deeds. We should not begrudge the happiness that the scoundrel gains from loving relationships, charitable acts, appreciation of the arts, and other worthy activities. To the extent, though, that the scoundrel wrongly benefits from villainy he or she does not deserve happiness. For Kant to say that the morally unworthy do not deserve to be happy, that the world would be better served if they were unhappy, resonates with our sense of justice. He understood the possibility of someone becoming unrighteously happy, being gratified by attaining wrongful goals. Such happiness is not a good.

The master hypnotist Although Kant did not bring them to the forefront, his analysis suggests other ways that happiness would not be a great personal good. Suppose a master hypnotist charms a person into thinking he or she possesses a happy state of mind. The person thinks he or she is happy and, thus, is happy under the contemporary understanding of the term. The state of mind, though, is false. It is not causally connected to the life the person

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has led, the character the person embodies, the choices the person has made, or accurate self-appraisals. The happiness is artificial because it is based only on an externally induced illusion. The same analysis holds true of a healthy person whose positive state of mind is induced externally by an injection of happiness serum.

Virtual reality Nozick’s experience machine not only undermines pure hedonism, but also the persuasiveness of the view that happiness, as understood by the popular rendering, is always a great good.24 We can surely imagine a person in the experience machine enjoying a predominantly positive state of mind. After all, that is the entire point of entering the machine’s virtual reality. But, as analyzed earlier, the machine’s major function is to remove us from reality and prevent us from making any difference in the world. Our rejection of an experience machine that encloses us within a framework of just our own experiences, suggests that connecting with things and values beyond our individual experiences is more important to us than the artificial happiness spawned by the machine.

Radical delusion Consider another case. A person enjoys extended bliss and attains the requisite psychological state that defines the contemporary notion of happiness. However, the person suffers from deep delusion: He sincerely believes he is living in the early nineteenth century and is Napoleon. His happiness is based on savoring his imagined power, his string of military triumphs, and hatching grandiose plans for the future. Yes, things could be worse. Better to be deluded Napoleon pleased by his imaginary lot than to be deluded Stalin dissatisfied by his imaginary life. Still, how can such a condition be good at all, much less a great personal good? If our positive state of mind is not connected to moral goodness, to valuable accomplishments, to continued intellectual growth, or even to reality, what is it worth?

The accident victim Return to an earlier example. Suppose you were victimized by a horrible automobile accident that rendered you incapable of any biographical life beyond that of a contented child. However, in your infantile condition you are happier than you were as a normal adult. True, after suffering a

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serious brain injury, a person is better off as an adult leading the life of a contented child than she would be leading the life of a miserable brat. But would we consider such a person fortunate? Would we hope to attain her situation?

Trivial pursuits If you were strongly socialized, even brainwashed, into responding joyfully to small pleasures and minor enterprises but were unable to show courage, self-sufficiency, and boldness would we count you fortunate because you were happy? Ignorance, under certain circumstances, can be bliss. Such bliss is no more valuable than the ignorance that grounds it. As noted previously, Nietzsche derided the last man as the most contemptible and despicable of creatures (Z I, “Zarathustra’s Prologue,” 5). Along with utilitarian philosophers, last men, Nietzsche’s male-gendered notion of embodied banality, extol the values of hedonism. The highest ambitions of last men are comfort and security. They are the extreme case of the herd mentality: habit, custom, indolence, egalitarianism, selfpreservation, and muted will to power prevail. Last men embody none of the inner tensions and conflicts that spur transformative action. They take no risks, lack convictions, avoid experimentation, and seek only bland survival. Such people lack deep convictions, inspiring projects, or significant purposes. They often attain happiness, but at an unacceptable cost. They enjoy happiness but engage only in trivial pursuits that preclude crafting worthy souls. With the proper imagination and appropriate details these examples can be more vividly and convincingly drawn. As it stands, I have sketched a host of happy people who enjoy a relatively enduring positive state of mind. None of these types exemplify an attractive lifestyle. Some deserve our pity, some our concern, others our contempt. Happiness so conceived is not the greatest personal good, or a great good, and in several cases not a good at all. Note that as unalluring as the hypothetical lives appear they are not the worst imaginable existences. To say that we would never prefer to adopt these lifestyles would be a mistake. Everything depends on our point of comparison. I would not prefer any of the hypothetical lives given my present situation. The lives depicted are all deficient. Some lack appropriate connection to reality. Some provide only muted meaning, significance, and value. Some are animated by extravagant psychological deficiencies. Such lifestyles neither warrant our allegiance nor inspire our confidence. Nevertheless, we can imagine even worse circumstances. We might prefer, for

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example, the simulated joys of the virtual reality machine to a life filled with enduring misery, oppression, and ignorance. That the hypothetical lives are not the worst imaginable existences is, though, faint consolation.

Happiness, meaning, and value Consider the lives of the following: Ludwig van Beethoven, Joe DiMaggio, Emily Dickinson, Soren Kierkegaard, Queen Elizabeth I, Abraham Lincoln, Jesus, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Moses, Emma Goldman, and Vincent Van Gogh. These lives are paradigms of meaning, value, and significance in religion, sports, literature, music, politics, philosophy, and art. In terms of relatively enduring accomplishments, influences, excellences, creations, and social effects these lives are among the best in their fields. Yet these people were not strikingly happy. While each of them flourished in many respects, none realized the extended peace or exuberance characteristic of happiness. Perhaps they demanded too much of themselves, saw reality too clearly, were unable to harbor self-flattering illusions, could not savor their feelings of pleasure, lacked the necessary biochemistry, or were too heroic to be happy. Robustly meaningful, valuable lives, then, are not necessarily happy lives.25 Accordingly, some people who attain happiness understood as a predominantly positive state of mind lead unworthy lives and other people who lead worthy lives do not attain happiness. Thus, how we attain happiness is crucial to its value; to be a great personal good, happiness must be constituted by or connected to the higher values; a worthwhile happiness is more than merely a relatively enduring positive psychological state; and happiness gains value when it is earned, when the happy person is a worthy person. Some contemporary philosophers argue that happiness is not merely an enduring positive state of mind. Happiness is not merely descriptive, but also normative. When we assert in good faith that we are happy we are not only reporting our psychological state but also positively evaluating our lives. We are saying that we are peaceful, contented, or exuberant and that we deserve these feelings given the lives we are leading. Our happiness is not capricious or fortuitous. It is merited by a life well lived. Appeals to evaluation invite a question about standards: Whose standards supply the relevant criteria for appraisal? Standards can be purely objective or purely subjective or some combination of the two. By invoking a normative standard, philosophers hope to connect “happiness” to value. But each type of standard bears its own strengths and weaknesses.

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Purely objective standards To invoke purely objective standards is to connect “happiness” most securely to value. We are happy if and only if our lives correlate to objective standards that define meaning, significance, and value. Under this view, the highest human end cannot merely be what a person chooses, but what all human beings must seek in order to be rational and moral. We must rationally apprehend and obey the imperatives of an external, metaphysical normative order.26 But objective standards of this kind are notoriously difficult to establish. Are they grounded in the dictates of a Supreme Being or embedded in Nature or in the proper application of Reason? All such claims are metaphysically dubious. And even if we could establish the existence of these metaphysical linchpins, we face the daunting problem of discerning which of our conclusions correspond to the imperatives of the Supreme Being, Nature or Reason. That is, even if we know that an objective standard exists, how do we know when our judgments comply with that standard? Moreover, an objective standard might suggest implausibly that one ideal lifestyle and series of preferences exists for all of us. Also, if we react to these difficulties by claiming that the allegedly objective standards are more earth-bound, grounded only in our traditions and societal ideals, then they are accessible. But accessibility brings a stiff price. The objective standards reflect merely intersubjective agreement, perhaps over time. Such a standard urges us to conform to prevalent norms and dominant ideas. These invitations are redolent with the stench of mere conventionalism. Finally, even if we could resolve all these difficulties, would it not be possible to fulfill the purely objective standards of happiness yet not feel happy? Could we still be sad? If so, insisting that we are happy, although we do not know it, rings hollow.

Purely subjective standards The seemingly insurmountable difficulties faced by purely objective standards have led some thinkers to invoke purely subjective criteria: I am happy only if I am living up to my personal preferences about how I should live. This is the happiness-as-positive-self-appraisal view.27 These preferences may or may not correlate to those of societal norms, alleged objective criteria embedded in the universe, or the imperatives of human reason. By reconnecting reality with normative judgment, this view makes happiness more valuable than it sometimes is under the happiness-as-

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predominantly-positive-state-of-mind position. However, opponents of subjectivism lodge three primary objections. First, they argue that we might be mistaken in our evaluation that we have met our own standards. We could err in thinking that we are living up to our personal preferences when we are not. Under such circumstances, we think we are happy but we are not. Because the happiness-as-positive-self-appraisal philosophers add a normative component to the meaning of happiness, they must admit the possibility of mistake in our appraisals. Therefore, our sincere reports of a positive, relatively enduring state of mind are not enough to establish that we are happy. We must also judge accurately that we are meeting our subjective standards about how our lives should be lived. The happiness-as-predominantly-positive-state-of-mind social scientists and philosophers claim happiness is purely descriptive: If I report truthfully that I am happy then I am happy. The causal link between my positive state of mind and what brought it about is unimportant for accurate claims to happiness. Deluded Napoleon, the person in the virtual reality machine, the modern version of Nietzsche’s last man, and the rest of my hypothetical frolickers are all happy. The happiness-as-positive-self-appraisal brigade must disagree. If I am deluded and merely think I am living up to my personal evaluative standards while I am not, then I wrongly think I am happy. So deluded Napoleon, assuming his personal evaluative standard is to conquer Europe, is not truly happy under this view (unless he antecedently desired to be deluded). He is not living up to his standards. He only thinks he is. If the hypnotized adult and person on the virtual reality machine have standards different from the lives they are actually leading then they are not happy even though they appear and claim to be happy. The modern version of Nietzsche’s last man, though, could still be happy under this view only if his major desires focus on leading precisely the indolent life he exemplifies. Thus, the happiness-as-positive-self-appraisal view connects happiness to reality and to normative judgment. The position denies legitimacy to those whose claims to happiness are grounded in deep delusion, artificial inducement, or external imposition. The position forces us to evaluate, not merely describe, our psychological state. The position admits degrees of happiness and does not impose a particular ideal on everyone. Whether these differences are improvements of competing understandings of happiness is contestable. Second, opponents of subjectivism argue that someone who fulfills internal standards that are immoral or unworthy does not merit happiness. The happiness attained by such a reprobate strikes a sour note. Accordingly, merely fulfilling our subjective standards is neither sufficient nor nec-

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essary for happiness. We should examine the quality of internal standards, not merely take them as givens. Third, critics point out that under this view happiness can be attained by meeting subjective standards that are uninspiring and effete, even if they are not immoral. Nietzsche’s last man, steadfastly pursuing only comfort, security, conformity, and indolence, could easily be happy. A young adult who suffers a serious, irreversible brain injury and endures as a contented child thereafter could easily be happy. Such happiness, although not the worst alternative available, is not necessarily a great good. Nietzsche sneers contemptuously at the happiness of the last man. We would not cheer the brain injury of the young adult even if it made her “happier” than she was prior to the injury. Again, I am not arguing that happiness-as-positive-self-appraisal fails to understand the real meaning of “happiness.” Such arguments are not my concern. I argue only that happiness attained on these grounds cannot be the greatest personal good, is not necessarily a great good, and is sometimes not a good at all.

Combining objective and subjective standards Disturbed by the implications of invoking purely objective or purely subjective standards, some philosophers argue that a more reasonable objectivism is required.28 Such an objectivism demands an appeal to both subjective standards internal to a life and to objective standards grounded in shared community life. The motivation of this view flows from a conviction that the happiness-as-positive-self-evaluation does not go far enough in connecting happiness and value. Although advocates of this view do not insist on one final good or a particular ideal lifestyle applicable to everyone, they resist the invitation of subjectivists to accept claims to happiness based on the satisfaction of immoral or unworthy desires. Again, opponents of subjectivism argue that someone who fulfills internal standards that are immoral or unworthy does not merit happiness. Accordingly, merely fulfilling our subjective standards is neither sufficient nor necessary for happiness. Our positive self-evaluation must be accurate; it must be based on a standard that is valuable, not merely a standard that happens to be ours. Under this view, people may assert sincerely that they enjoy a relatively enduring positive psychological state and that they are meeting their subjective standards for living, but be mistaken that they are happy. Happiness also requires standards that are rationally justified. Some subjective standards will fail this test. This can happen for numerous reasons. A set

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of subjective standards might not fulfill the needs and basic wants of physical, emotion, and social life: a person might set standards that are dismally low. A set of subjective standards might be radically at odds with dominant, justified social morality: a person might have immoral standards. A set of subjective standards might not lead us to a good life, one embodying sufficient exercise of the best human capabilities: a person might set standards that dishonor uniquely human attributes, or that insufficiently animate robust self-creation. Although no single ideal or particular lifestyle must be fulfilled, not all subjective standards will foster a happy life. Human lives have no single, preordained telos, but some lives are rationally indefensible. Happiness as accurate-positive-self-appraisal has its roots in Aristotelian and self-realization theory.29 Under this view, people whose dominant life goals are to collect bobby pins, to become a famous gangster, to luxuriate in a simulated, favorable environment, to derive contentment from deep delusion, and the like cannot be happy. Regardless of their extended peace, serenity, or exuberance, and their correct judgment that they are fulfilling their internal standards, such people lead rationally or morally indefensible lives. The collection of bliss-seekers described above falls short because leading a rationally and morally justified life is necessary to attain happiness under this view. Beginning with sound intentions, this view strikes an imperialistic chord. The good intentions center on reconnecting happiness with value. Possessing a relatively enduring, positive psychological state grounded in adequately satisfying our subjective standards is not enough. Such happiness can be overrated, even dishonorable, irrational, or pathetic. Only reconnecting happiness with value, rationality, and higher human capabilities can reestablish its necessary worth. The imperialistic chord resounds when we understand that this view dismisses sincere, accurate claims to happiness through semantic fiat. The advocate of happiness-as-predominantly-positive-state-of-mind could object: “Why cannot happiness be grounded on simple pursuits, based on the exercise of limited capabilities, or correlated to our subjective expectations? Why say that the adult who suffers a terrible brain injury and who can live only the life of a contented child cannot be happy? Granted, such a life is less worthy than the lives to which we aspire, but sometimes we must play the cards we are dealt. Better, in the circumstances described, to live the life of a contented child than numerous other horrible imaginable lives. Why not say that the injured adult is happy, while recognizing that but for the injury he or she would have probably lived a much better life? As long

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as we do not insist that happiness is the greatest personal good, no problem arises. Sure, some happy lives are better lives overall than others on a host of dimensions, but that does not rule out the latter from being happy lives.”

Conceptions of happiness Again, we confront the tension in conceptions of happiness. As demonstrated, achieving happiness understood as a predominantly positive psychological state does not necessarily translate into a valuable life. Worthwhile happiness presupposes a connection to value, grounded either in metaphysically objective standards or in rational human appraisal. Why, though, must happiness be understood as accompanying only valuable lives? Nietzsche disparaged the happiness of last men as unworthy of emulation, but he never denied that they were happy. Their happiness manifested acutely that a positive psychological state is not necessarily the highest value or even valuable. Nietzsche would agree with advocates of the instant view that a worthy happiness must be grounded in valuable attitudes and activities—although he would excoriate the conventionalism and appeal to societal norms upon which their rational and moral appraisals often depend. Nietzsche would also agree that self-direction was crucial and that a relatively enduring, positive psychological state is merited by those who live well. Happiness, though, for Nietzsche was not automatically a great good. The greatest good is the maximally affirmative attitude toward life, the values it exudes, the creative projects it undertakes, and the obstacles it vanquishes. A worthwhile happiness is often, but not invariably, an accompanying benefit. Another possible objection to the happiness as accurate-positive-selfappraisal position is that it might rule out a social reformer such as Martin Luther King, Jr., from being considered happy because his values conflicted with those of the larger community. But the theory does not require a tight correlation between the values of individuals and those practiced by the larger community. The theory rules out only irrational, morally indefensible lifestyles. For example, in the case of King, to argue that he was insisting only that the larger community live up to its own professed ideals is plausible. Thus, the theory would not rule out the possibility of happiness for King. Still, this view bears a murky relationship to existing societal norms and is vulnerable to degenerating into mere conventionalism if applied clumsily. In sum, the happiness as accurate-positive-self-appraisal position plausibly reconnects happiness with value. By going beyond happiness-aspositive-self-appraisal and requiring independent rational evaluation or

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minimal conditions of rational affirmation, the happiness as accuratepositive-self-appraisal position ensures that happiness is typically a good, often a great good. Yet it does not appeal to highly contestable metaphysical entities such as the dictates of a Supreme Being, the natural order built into the universe, or the imperatives of a fixed human nature. As a result, the position reasonably defines worthwhile happiness. My major misgiving is its aspiration to define happiness as such. A broad understanding of happiness is preferable to views that demand through definitional fiat that happiness must be valuable, even a great good. Nietzsche understood that greatness necessarily involves suffering and the overcoming of grave obstacles. We cannot eliminate suffering, but we can use it creatively. Suffering and resistance can stimulate and nourish our highest creative energies. By changing our attitude toward suffering from pity to affirmation, we open ourselves to greatness. For Nietzsche, the core of the new happiness is continuous, insatiable striving in pursuit of self-overcoming and greater strength. Happiness, then, is a process—a particular type of activity—not a certain kind of condition or state. Progress is measured in terms of increased power in confrontation with more difficult challenges. In that vein, robustly meaningful lives do not necessarily include extended peace or exuberance, but they almost always include the ecstasy joined to great accomplishments and pursuits. But heroism and greatness often preclude happiness in non-Nietzschean senses because periods of savoring and contentment are more fleeting than in nonheroic meaningful lives. The hero confronts greater obstacles, expends his or her energies more extravagantly, and is less likely to survive than the nonhero. Better to be Beethoven, DiMaggio, or Michelangelo unhappy than to be happy by minimally fulfilling the criteria of the happiness-as-accuratepositive-self-appraisal conception. Still, non-Nietzschean happiness is not everything, but it is something. Beethoven’s life would have been better if he could have been happy, as well as being one of the world’s greatest creators, but his life was still great and eminently worth living. DiMaggio’s life would have been better if he could have been happy as well as being one of the world’s greatest athletes, but his life was still great and eminently worth living. (A complicating factor: Is there a connection between unhappiness and exceptional creativity? Did Beethoven’s and DiMaggio’s perfectionist tendencies, psychological conflicts, and profound dissatisfactions contribute to their high creativity? Could they have been happy and still have produced what they did?) Happiness remains valuable in most cases, but it is not the most important human aspiration. Robustly meaningful, valuable lives bring satis-

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faction and are typically accompanied by worthwhile happiness. Even if they cannot guarantee happiness, such lives are more valuable than happy, minimally meaningful lives. Even worthwhile happiness, then, is not the greatest personal good. A life lived well is a greater good than the deserved gratification that typically accompanies it: Better to live extraordinarily well and not be particularly happy, than to live less well and be deservedly happy. In sum, a happy life is not the same thing as a robustly meaningful, valuable life, although the two are often correlated. We are best off having it all—living happy, robustly meaningful, valuable lives. But if we must choose, a robustly meaningful, valuable life is preferable to a merely happy life. In that vein, if our children lead robustly meaningful, valuable lives, they will deserve worthwhile happiness and often realize it. But even if they are not predominantly happy, they will have fought the good fight, fashioned a worthwhile biography, and added value to the world. We should all be so fortunate.

CHAPTER FIVE DYING GRACEFULLY

Classical legend has it that a young Roman soldier who embodied the grandest of his nations’ values and virtues, died tragically on the battlefield. His fellow legionnaires mournfully broke the news of his valiant death and returned his lifeless body to his parents in the city. His father, a Stoic, solemnly observed, “I did not think that I sired an immortal.” The Roman father’s response may strike us as harsh and insensitive. Yet, he reminds us that we are mortal, contingent beings and our lives are fragile. We are all destined for the same earthly end. Although finitude is our context, it need not be our defeat. We should begin by understanding the sense in which most of us have biographical lives that extend beyond our biological deaths.

18. Value Biographical Lives: James Rachels “Many people die at twenty-five and aren’t buried until they are seventy-five.” ʊBenjamin Franklin

In 1974, James W. Rachels (1941-2003) introduced me to the distinction between biological and biographical lives. The idea of biographical life revolves around human life as a narrative, a compilation of stories. We are a series of stories in that we understand and identify ourselves through a chain of events, choices, actions, thoughts, and relationships. Our biographical lives, including value and meaning connected to our death and events thereafter, extend beyond our biological lives, which are measured by earthly existence. Jim used that distinction to argue that voluntary euthanasia was sometimes morally permissible in part because a person’s biographical life may end even though his or her biological life continues. Jim argued that without a biographical life a person’s biological life is insignificant. I now think a more precise way of putting the point is that a person, for example, in an irreversible coma lacks an autobiographical life —lacking all significant cognitive capabilities, the person can no longer participate in writing his or her life story—even though his or her biologi-

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cal life continues. In most cases, our biographical lives continue beyond our biological lives, but our autobiographical lives can vanish earlier.

Death and meaning Our awareness of death creates opportunities for meaning that would not otherwise exist. Death itself also creates opportunities for meaning. How we die can add postmortem meaning to our life, even though we will not experience that meaning. Some philosophers dispute this. Jay Rosenberg argues, for example, “There is no possibility that a person’s history might extend beyond that person’s death.”1 If he means only that human beings are mortal, not immortal, his words are harmless, although disputed by theists. But if he means what he literally says, that the history of a person ends with death, then he is mistaken. The legacy of Jesus, Lincoln, Michelangelo, Mother Teresa, Jackie Robinson, and their like, bears meaning and value that transcend their deaths. And in some cases, such as Jesus, the way one dies brightens the legacy. The narrative of a human life often continues beyond that person’s death. Many human beings recognize this by consciously nurturing legacies, images, creative works, children, and projects that flourish beyond their deaths. However, we are aware that our projects cannot endure forever and we pursue them in that light. Death, then, does not supervene on life; it provides a context for life. Admittedly, for most of us, our biographical story does not continue long after our deaths. Our fantasies to the contrary notwithstanding, we are not indispensable. At most, our departure would bring deep sorrow to those closest to us. Once those few who actually knew us and were influenced by us themselves die, most of us remain, at most, represented only by uncaptioned photos in web-covered albums stored in the corner of neglected attics. Most of our deaths will not be accompanied by massive displays of anxiety and gnashing of teeth. Beyond family, friends, and close associates, others will take note of our demise, perhaps attend a service, moan, “Too bad about Old Spike,” or whisper, “No great loss,” and get on with the mundane rhythms of life. Still, the question of what my future death means to me now is crucial. As Nietzsche insisted, the brio with which I live each moment of my life, the spirit of amor fati, a maximally affirmative attitude toward life, is paramount. The meaning of my death hinges on the quality of my life. But we cannot exude a lifelong giddiness. As we project toward the future, we can become more aware of the processes, not merely the outcomes that constitute our lives. To make our

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activities more fulfilling, to focus our creative interest in the act of creation instead of only on the result, speeds us toward the Nietzschean ideal. I now have desires about numerous events that can occur only after my death: the disposition of my estate, the care and handling of my corpse, my reputation after death, among others. These are examples of transcendent interests that can be fulfilled or transgressed only after my death.2 I have a stake in such matters but I cannot know now how they will be affected by posthumous events. My biographical life transcends my biological life. Again, much of our behavior while alive is motivated by a desire to leave a positive legacy to those who survive our death. We want to be remembered in light of what we accomplished and the kind of person we were. We deserve this recognition based on our past performance and deeds. Is our desire to be remembered irrational? Surely if annihilation is our destiny we shall never be able to experience pleasant sensations or even be aware of the fond remembrances that others may have of us; but many of us still want to be remembered fondly even after conceding all this. And this desire may be grounded in the principle of desert. One deserves to be remembered in accord with her past deeds. Our desire to be fondly remembered may reflect our conviction that a principle of justice should be applied properly when survivors evaluate the life we led. Even after we die, certain things can happen to our corpses, our reputations, and certain of our desires and interests. Some of these things are morally wrong because they violate two paramount principles of justice: desert and entitlement. We have a justified interest that the imperatives of justice be acknowledged in dealing with us even after we are dead. Ignoring death bed promises, mutilating corpses, wrongly distributing the proceeds of wills, maliciously slandering the reputations of the dead, and like outrages are immoral because they violate the demands of justice. A healthy, adequate awareness of death can energize meaningful activities. Human beings often take a romantic-heroic path in trying to transcend death by participating in projects that endure beyond their deaths. We achieve a fragile immortality by raising children, sharing grand political and social causes, creating new technological and communication networks, making artistic contributions, and the like. My writing this book, a text that will outlive its author, is an effort in that direction. We connect to value by extending beyond ourselves through relationships, projects, and creative endeavors upon which we stamp our identities. A biological life consists of being alive, while a biographical life consists of facts about a person’s history and character. My biographical life may extend beyond the time when I die in that I have interests in certain states of affairs that will or will not obtain long after I have ceased to exist.

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A person’s biographical life is broader than and includes a person’s wellbeing. Accordingly, events and states of affairs about a person that occur or obtain both while she is alive and after she dies may make that person’s biographical life better or worse than it otherwise would have been even though those events and states of affairs do not directly or indirectly affect her body or mind. Existing persons have transcendent interests, interests in states of affairs that will obtain or not, only after those persons no longer exist. The content of transcendent interests is not limited to the existence or experience of the person who embodies them.

Transcendent interests Such interests do not perish with death. The object of such interests will either obtain or not obtain after death. As such, posthumous events and states of affairs at least affect a person’s biographical life, which is not complete until after her death. Posthumous villainy is wrong independently of the effect it may have on the living, on the functions of societal practices, and on the sanctity of intrinsic values. Instead, such treachery can falsely and maliciously distort the narrative of biographical lives. A pioneer in explicating the notion of biographical lives, William Ruddick (1931- ) adds that our biographical lives are susceptible “to retrospective illumination and revision, later events leading to redescription of earlier events. In some instances, later events reveal aspects unnoticed or concealed earlier . . . In other instances, a later outcome shows an earlier action to have been shrewd, lucky, prescient, overoptimistic, foolish, and so forth.”3 Moreover, like narratives, within biographical lives we describe events in terms of their causal and explanatory links. We can best grasp and present biographical lives through their narrative properties: “In living, most people create lives that have a structure and content that can only be grasped through narratives, more or less detailed, selective, and dramatically organized.”4 Ruddick points out that biographies transcend autobiographies and do not end with the death of their subject. Biographical lives, then, are legitimate subjects of posthumous events and states of affairs. Biographies are the narrated aspect of lives, conjoined before death with the other general feature of lives, that is lives-as-lived. If we are willing to allow lives-as-narrated to continue after death even if bereft of lives-aslived, then we have, I think, as good a postmortem surrogate for the no longer existing liver of that life as we could want, a surrogate that can be harmed or benefited—and further extended—by what others do or say after the liver’s death.5

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Ruddick continues by sketching several ways in which postmortem events and states of affairs might affect biographical lives. First, postmortem treacheries and betrayals make a life worse than it otherwise would have been: “the betrayal could make a life worse by altering how we would otherwise narrate that life.”6 Second, new sources of information about a life may be uncovered posthumously. The discovery of hitherto unknown letters, diaries, testimony, and other facts, can often compel us to revise our understanding of past events in a life. Third, posthumous events and states of affairs may lead us to give earlier events new significance. Events that were misunderstood or dimly understood antemortem (prior to death) may fall into clearer focus because of posthumous activity. For example, the antemortem Silas’s miserly ways may seem mysterious during the final five years of his life, but will be better understood when at his death Silas’s will is announced and it provides a generous endowment to his favorite university. Fourth, postmortem actions may add further events to a life. Funerals, commemorations, posthumous awards and the like may enhance a person’s story. Ruddick calls these processes retro-narration: “the narrated life is altered in that we cannot continue to recount it as we previously had.”7 He admits that almost all biographical lives have psychological and temporal limits: “devotion to the person or their shared projects fades, and fatigue takes its toll. This may occur sooner than the seven years allowed by law for a missing person to return and reclaim his or her place in a life shared and held open by devoted kith and kin.”8 The spirit of Ruddick’s insight is that we hope that our deaths and enduring biographical lives keep faith with the way that we lived. The final events of our biological life and posthumous occurrences can significantly affect the structure and character of our biographical life taken as a whole. Ruddick’s account resonates with good sense. But does the posthumous alteration of a narrative or biographical life in response to villainy constitute “harm”? Can a biographical life be harmed—does it bear interests? If a biographical life can be harmed, by being made worse than it otherwise would have been, does that imply that the subject of that biographical life is also harmed or made worse? To answer such vexing questions we must analyze the seminal work of Joel Feinberg (1926-2004).

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19. Consider Posthumous Harm and Benefit: Joel Feinberg “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don’t want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment.” ʊWoody Allen

Feinberg argues that having interests is a necessary condition for having rights, for having a good of one’s own, and for being harmed and benefited. Having “awareness, expectation, belief, desire, aim, and a purpose” are necessary conditions of having interests.9 We have duties to only those entities that embody interests, although we have duties regarding entities lacking interests.10 Thus, we may have duties regarding the treatment of rocks, roads, meadows, and factories because such objects serve our purposes: human beings are interested in them. Merely physical objects may be valuable to human beings, but they lack a good of their own. Such objects lack interests and embody no basis for moral claims: “Having no conscious wants or goals of their own, trees cannot know satisfaction or frustrations, pleasure or pain.”11Although we can destroy physical objects and natural landscapes, we cannot harm them because they lack interests that might be set back, frustrated, infringed upon, or prevented from coming to fruition. Only entities with interests can claim certain treatment as their due or have it claimed on their behalf.12 The experience requirement holds that in order to be the subject of good or evil, a person must experience the appropriate sensations or at least be aware that he or she has been benefited or deprived. The experience requirement, then, is taken to be a necessary condition of harm: only if a person experiences negative sensations because of external events or is at least aware that one of his or her interests has been set back or frustrated can that person be harmed. When Feinberg considers posthumous harm to a deceased’s reputation he disputes the experience requirement. He imagines a reprobate who defames Feinberg’s reputation among a large number of people in a remote area of the country. Feinberg becomes an object of ridicule among that group, but he never learns of the incident nor does he suffer because of it. The area is apparently so remote that the effects of the slander do not spread. Yet, Feinberg concludes that he has been injured even though he would have been unaware of what happened: “I have an interest in a good reputation simpliciter, in addition to my interest in avoiding hurt feelings, embarrassment, and economic injury.”13 In this example, Feinberg clearly perceives a distinction between being harmed and being hurt. He con-

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cludes that he would have been harmed by the defamation, even though he would not have been hurt by it. That is, his interest in the reputation he deserves would have been set back and Feinberg would thereby be harmed even though he would not be hurt by the defamation, because he was unaware of it and would not suffer any negative sensations as a result of it.

Posthumous harm and benefit Feinberg’s insights provide the point of departure of my view of posthumous harm and posthumous benefit. To say a person has an objective interest in something is to say that it, on balance, improves the person’s well-being or opportunity for well-being. To say that a person has a subjective interest in something is to say that the person desires, wants, or seeks it. I can be subjectively interested in something—I can desire it— even though it is not in my objective interests. For example, I might be interested in drinking a quart of motor oil, even though my objective interests are not thereby served. I may want to drink the oil because I do not know the results of doing so; or I may know the results but not care; or I may know and care but value other ramifications of the act more than I disfavor the negative consequences; or I may simply have strong selfdestructive tendencies and desire on some level to act in ways that undermine my overall well-being.14 Also, something can be in my objective interests but I may not desire it. Eating cauliflower and certain types of fish may objectively advance my nutrition and health, but I may not want to consume them. I may not be aware that eating such foods nurtures health; I may know but still prefer not to consume them; I may prefer to advance other interests more than the ones at issue; or I may decline these foods for any number of other reasons. One way in which human beings are harmed is when our objective interests are unjustifiably set back, frustrated, transgressed, or impaired. What benefits me promotes my objective interests, but not all withholdings of benefits harm me. Often withholding benefits from me is justified because I lack an antecedent claim of entitlement to them. Cashing a large wager on the winner of the Kentucky Derby is in my objective interests, in the sense that it advances my well-being, but officials at Churchill Downs do not wrong or harm me if they refuse to cash my losing ticket. Everything that benefits me is in my objective interests (advances my overall well-being), but I am harmed only when my justified claim or entitlement to a benefit is wrongly thwarted. Usually, when other people decline the opportunity to advance my objective interests their rejections are morally

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permissible. But when they set back, frustrate, or impair my objective interests in receiving benefits to which I am entitled then they harm me. This is the force of the expression that harms “unjustifiably set back, frustrate, transgress, impair, or prevent interests.” Generally, subjective desires are not always enough to establish moral interests. However, in those cases where a subjective desire is in our objective interests and the desire is unfulfilled because of the wrongful actions of another party then harm has typically occurred. The following counterexample to the experience requirement has been around a long time: Your neighbor is an incorrigible peeping tom who gains much pleasure from monitoring the nightly activities of others. One weekend while you are away, he enters your home and installs monitoring devices in your bedroom. He is so proficient that you never learn of his act. You suffer no painful sensations or unpleasant states of consciousness because you are unaware that your bedroom has been bugged. You continue to act as you had prior to your neighbor’s misdeed. Your neighbor continues to enjoy great pleasure from listening to and viewing your nightly activities. Not a moment of your life is different, at least in terms of your lived experiences. But, despite the fact you suffer no unpleasant sensations, the peeping tom has perpetrated an evil and a wrong against you. Your right to privacy has been invaded, although you are unaware of the transgression. You have been harmed, your rights have been violated, even though you have not been hurt because you are unaware of the harm, and have not suffered unpleasant states of consciousness from the violation. Your interest in privacy is not defined by your belief that your interest remains intact. Your interest in privacy is fulfilled only if your interest remains intact. Your interest is in your privacy as such, not merely in your thinking that your privacy has not been invaded. Imagine that a police officer discovers the peeping tom and begins to take the miscreant into custody. The peeping tom objects: “Look here, officer. If you arrest me, you will have to inform my neighbors. My neighbors will then be very upset and suffer greatly because they will now know that I have been monitoring their activities for the past five years. The net effect will be great pain for them, pain for me because I face prosecution, no apparent joy for anyone. But if you let me go, I will stop my activities, and the net effect will be a loss of great pleasure for me, as I really enjoyed watching them at night, no pain for them as they will continue to be unaware of what I did. You have a moral obligation to let me go.” Alternate speech, if the perpetrator is feeling lucky: “But if you let me go, I will continue my activities, and the net effect will be even more pleasure for me, no pain for them, and the overall pleasure-to-pain ratio will increase

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dramatically. You have a moral obligation to let me go. In fact, maybe you should help me to ensure that my neighbors never discover my activity!” The peeping tom will be unsuccessful, even if the calculation of net effects is correct. The example demonstrates brightly that the experience requirement is unpersuasive. We can be wronged and victimized, even though we suffer neither painful sensations nor unpleasant states of consciousness as a result of that wrong. Take this example from a different angle: If you did discover that the peeping tom had been monitoring your nocturnal activities, then you would feel wronged. But that sense of wrongness flows from what the peeping tom was doing, not from your discovery. Your recognition that the peeping tom’s activities harmed you animates your outrage. You acknowledge that you had been harmed—the peeping tom violated your right to privacy—all along. Once you make the discovery, you will be hurt because you understand that you have been harmed. In sum, we are sometimes harmed by events because they violate our rights or transgress against our just entitlements. But such events do not necessarily hurt us—that do not cause us pain or suffering—if we are unaware of them. What we do not know may not hurt us, but it can still harm us. For example, if someone tells malicious lies about me to a third party behind my back, the lies may harm my reputation but I may never discover the betrayal. I am harmed because my interest in maintaining my deserved, high reputation is transgressed upon, but I am not hurt by the lies because I am unaware of them, and thus, I am not pained by them. The experience requirement, defines good and bad too narrowly. The general moral principle, reflecting our moral intuitions in this matter, is that: It is morally wrong to contravene the objective interests or subjective desires of human beings unless complying with those interests or desires would violate weightier moral obligations, or unless the treatment required to comply with those interests or desires is supererogatory (above or beyond the call of moral duty), or unless the human beings at issue lack a justified entitlement to the benefits at stake. Some interests of human beings can only be fulfilled or frustrated after they die. For example, a person’s transcendent interests concerning the discharge of her will, the treatment of her corpse, the maintenance of her reputation after she is dead, and the future well-being of her loved ones can be affected only after she dies. So not only do human beings have interests that are fulfillable after they are dead, but they have interests that are only fulfillable after they are dead. A critic might rejoin that the only interest we genuinely have in such matters is that it is important for us while living to think our desires in

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these things will be respected after we die. As long as we think that others will not malign our reputations, or mutilate our corpse, or discharge wrongly our will, then our interests are satisfied. Such a view confuses (a) a person’s thinking her interests will be fulfilled after she dies and (b) her interests being fulfilled after she dies. Our interests and desires are not fulfilled merely by our thinking that they are. Only if the objects of our interests and desires are realized are these interests and desires satisfied. Our interests in not being slandered after we die, not having our corpse mutilated, and the like are not fulfilled by our thinking that such acts will not occur, but by those acts not occurring. If, on the contrary, our interests and desires were truly reducible to our thinking they were fulfilled, then they could be satisfied by the manipulations of an able hypnotist.

The existence requirement Perhaps Feinberg and I have plausibly shown that the experience requirement and the hedonism from which it often arises form an inadequate moral account. But one formidable barrier remains to those arguing for the possibility of posthumous harm and posthumous benefit: the existence requirement that insists that the harm of evil and the benefit of good require an identifiable, living subject. Under the existence requirement, if harm is the setting back, thwarting, frustration, or prevention of an interest; if interests are embodied only by living entities; if the dead therefore lack interests; then the dead cannot be harmed. The existence requirement concerns not the experiencing of harm, but the existence of a subject to whom harm can be imputed. A grave metaphysical problem lurks: interests cannot be free-floating, they must attach to an interest-bearing entity. To what interest-bearing entity do the alleged interests of the dead attach? Moreover, there is a serious temporal problem: that I have now certain desires, wants, and interests regarding matters such as the disposition of my will, my surviving reputation, and the treatment of my corpse does not establish that after I am dead I retain those interests. After all, there is presumably no “I” that persists after death; there is only my soon-to-be-rotting corpse. Thus, we return to our original questions: How can mere corpses, which apparently lack all the prerequisites for interests, have interests predicated of it? How can the dead have moral status if they are not interest-bearing entities? To answer such questions, I must first advance plausible notions of interests and rights that pertain even posthumously. Although the perfect account or theory of rights has yet to be unveiled, my view is that a person has a right to something under the following con-

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ditions: it is prima facie wrong to withhold that thing or fail to do that thing for the person; the reason it is wrong involves the person’s interest in that something (for example, her interests in a good reputation, proper disposal of her worldly possessions, and considerate handling of her corpse); furthermore, third parties can justifiably act on behalf of the person, as her agent or proxy, and claim that the interests of the person be respected in such matters; these third parties can also sometimes intervene to prevent a potential violator of these interests from succeeding; and withholding that something or failing to do that something for the person is often an injustice—a denial of the person’s due based on her entitlements. My account does not rise to a full theory of rights, but, at most, explains what it means to have a right. Under the interest theory of rights,15 moral and legal rules conferring rights do so in order to promote the right-holder’s interests. The rightholder is in a position to benefit from the fulfillment of the duty that others bear by virtue of his possession of the right. The promotion or fulfillment of the right-holder’s interests is viewed as the reason to impose correlated duties upon other moral agents. Rights are typically conferred generally and less frequently are person-specific. Thus, not all the rights a person possesses will in fact benefit that person. For example, I have a currently recognized right to dispose of my worldly possessions through a final will and testament, but if I lack worldly possessions then this right will not benefit me because I cannot exercise it. Still, I could benefit from it under different circumstances. The interests at stake under this theory of rights are not based on the subjective desires of particular people—what each person in fact wants and prefers—but on the objective value of the matter at issue. Not all interests translate into rights. Some general interests may be too trivial to merit enshrinement as rights; the promotion of other interests may impose too onerous and unreasonable a burden on other people; the fulfillment of still other interests might be unenforceable. Accordingly, which general human interests should be recognized as legal and moral rights is contestable. The distinguishing feature of the interest theory of rights is that the right-holder is the beneficiary of the correlated duties that other people bear. The right-holder or his properly empowered proxy may waive most of his rights under the appropriate circumstances. Some rights, though, are inalienable. For example, I cannot waive my right to freedom in order to sell myself into slavery. Moreover, because a person’s interests can sometimes conflict, on occasion my right to one thing may impair my interest in something else. I do not regard such situations as paradoxical for the interest theory of rights because, in general, moral considerations

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often conflict; we must determine and fulfill the more stringent duty, the action supported by the strongest moral reasons. Accordingly, if saving a person’s life requires that I break a promise to a friend to meet her for dinner, no one is paralyzed by moral paradox in deciding what to do. Beyond general rights, person-specific rights, are also generated contractually. If you promise to wash my car for forty dollars which I remit, then you are under a duty to provide and I have a right to receive the service. Voluntary agreements trigger a host of person-specific rights, but even these arise from the general right flowing from the interest in autonomous, free choice: We all have a general right, constrained by the like right of other moral agents and other moral considerations, to voluntarily enter into arrangements with others, hopefully with fully informed consent and the capabilities required to arrive at such judgments. Also, a person’s specific social role or job may confer rights that others lack, at times without promoting the interests of the right-holder. For example, a jury in our judicial system has the right (and a duty) to render a verdict in the appropriate legal case, but the right does not seemingly arise from any interests that the jurors embody. This could be viewed as a limitation of the interest theory of rights. But such role-differentiated rights might be traceable to broader interests or duties. Thus, a person accused of a crime has a right to trial by jury. This general right presumably serves the interests of everyone. As a result of this general right, citizens have a duty to assume the role of jurors if called upon and if selected. Once a person becomes a juror, he is levied the duty and bestowed the right to participate in the process of rendering a verdict. The presiding judge, who among other rights and duties holds the right to sentence a guilty person, also seems to possess a right that does not promote any of his particular interests. But, again, we can probably trace the judge’s role-differentiated right back to a general right of everyone to a certain type of judicial system and criminal process. In any event, whether such cases pose serious problems for the interest theory of rights is unclear. A non-exhaustive list of the rights of the dead would include: the right to dispose of property; the right to the reputation that is merited by deeds performed while alive or through testamentary provisions; the right to posthumous awards to which a justifiable claim of entitlement can be lodged; and the right to specify burial procedures and the handling of one’s corpse.16 Having an interest in something is a necessary, but not sufficient condition, of having a right to that something.

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The modest thesis of posthumous wrongs This view contends that living persons have the rights, grounded in transcendent interests, I have just sketched. If one or two of these seem controversial then restrict the list to those you can accept or add some rights you think ought to be included. The general point is that while living we have widely recognized rights that involve transcendent interests, which can be fulfilled or thwarted only after we are dead. An interest theory would account for such rights, as I have, on the basis of the rightholder’s interest. That a current right held by Jones can entail future duties on the part of Smith does not generate paradox.17 For example, Jones could render appropriate consideration today that would place Smith under an obligation to provide a service one year from today. Instead of declaring that the dead have rights, we need only conclude that their survivors have duties. The rights of the living continue to levy moral duties on those who survive them even after the persons who possessed those rights have died. Such rights do not continue to exist as free-floating, detached metaphysical entities, nor do they attach to any postmortem entities. Instead, such rights, by their very nature, make sense only if they impose future duties. The moral considerations that ground the rights possessed by the antemortem person—who is the person as he or she can be described at some point during biological life—are enough to generate duties upon those who survive. Even if a person’s interests and rights perish when the person dies, the moral considerations (which are often general and occasionally personspecific) that grounded the rights persist. The time of the creation of a duty and the time of performance may vary. I can enter a contract today that requires another person to manufacture a product in three years in return for my advance payment. At the time we enter into such a contract, I have the right to have the specified product manufactured and the other person has a correlated duty to create the product, even though that duty will not be discharged until three years later. If the other person does not manufacture the product in three years, our contract has been breached. This is the case whether I remain alive, but somehow never discover the breach—perhaps I have simply forgotten about the entire transaction—or if I die within the three-year period. Assuming the manufacture of the product at issue was not connected necessarily to my being alive, the delinquent manufacturer breached a contractual duty to me, regardless of whether I am now alive or dead. Contractual rights and duties were created in 2010; the manufacturer breached his duty in 2013; and assuming that I had died prior to 2013, the victim was the antemortem Belliotti. But this does not imply that the postmortem Belliotti

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(my corpse at death and thereafter) was harmed, or that the antemortem Belliotti was harmed all along but was unaware of that harm. Accordingly, under an interest theory, human beings have rights such as: the right to dispose of property; the right to the reputation that is merited by deeds performed while alive or through testamentary provisions; the right to posthumous awards to which a justifiable claim of entitlement can be lodged; and the right to specify burial procedures and the handling of one’s corpse (“rights connected to transcendent interests”). A critic might argue that the existence of duties without correlated rights is problematic. How can living people have duties to those now dead when the rights of the dead presumably expired with the rightholder? One approach might be to point out that, at times, we do recognize duties without correlated rights. For example, suppose a small child is drowning in a shallow pond. You are the only possible rescuer. The pond is shallow and your rescue attempt will pose no danger or significant sacrifice to you, but the pond is deep enough that the child will drown without your aid. Many would argue that you have a moral duty to save the child under these circumstances; but that the child does not have a right to be saved by you, a complete stranger without any prior contractual obligations to the child. In fact, following Kant, some philosophers define imperfect duties, such as the duties to support the poor and aid those in distress, as permitting exceptions and allowing multiple ways in which they may be fulfilled. Imperfect duties are presumably circumstantial, meaning that we could not live our lives reasonably if we were constantly fulfilling them. Moreover, the recipients of our support and aid do not have a right to be supported or aided at the particular times at which we fulfill those duties. Other examples of duties without correlated rights are available. Controversially, some philosophers argue that human beings have moral duties toward animals even though animals do not possess rights. Also, we have moral duties toward future generations even though we cannot now identify any specific entities that might embody correlated rights. (Other philosophers argue that both animals and future generations do possess rights.) Sometimes a person may waive his right to something, but the correlated duty of others persists. For example, if someone waives her right not to be mistreated by others—perhaps she gives her informed consent to be mistreated because she is a masochist or believes she deserves to be punished or has deep self-undermining impulses—that does not relieve the rest of us of our duty not to mistreat the person. Another example may be attitudinal wrongs: If one person views or regards another person inappropriately— an executive views her secretary only in explicitly sexual ways—she has

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violated her duty not to objectify or dehumanize others, but no right of the victim has necessarily been infringed.18 However, I am convinced that the modest thesis need not enter this quagmire. In the case of posthumous villainy, the perpetrator has failed in his duty to the deceased; that duty does not necessarily correlate to a right held by the victim; although the right vanishes at death, the duty of others persists because of the nature of the right—that imposed future duties and in some cases imposed only future duties. Recognizing rights connected to transcendent interests requires that we antecedently acknowledge that the appropriate duties will persist beyond the lifespan of the right-holder. Otherwise, such rights would be absurd, or a sham, or a grand (short-lived) duplicity from the outset. Accordingly, rights connected to transcendent interests do correlate with their respective duties and the modest thesis need not mire itself in controversies over the correlation thesis. The modest thesis does not need to assign rights to postmortem entities. I believe that this is what grounds Ronald Dworkin’s view that “it makes sense to say that people who are now dead or permanently unconscious still have interests. We mean that their lives will have been more successful if the interests they formed while alive and conscious flourish when they are unconscious or dead.”19 Under the modest thesis, although the dead do not literally retain interests, their biographical lives can be greatly affected by posthumous events related to their transcendent interests. How posthumous events affect these transcendent interests change the value or success of our lives as a whole. Judith Jarvis Thompson straightforwardly accounts for how the dead can have claims against the living: X’s having a claim against Y just is Y’s behavior being constrained in a complex set of ways; if that is right, then there is no difficulty in the supposition that those no longer alive have claims now, for there is no difficulty in the supposition that the behavior of the living is now constrained in the appropriate ways . . . there is such a thing as making things worse for the dead . . . a particular instance of trespass or harm-causing might be very bad for its [living] victim, and thus be an infringement of a very stringent claim, even if the victim never finds out it was committed. So too, I should think we can say, for the dead.20

Again, not all interests or claims that human beings possess translate into commensurate rights. In my view, possessing an interest in something is a necessary but not sufficient condition of having a right to that something. But where the moral reasons grounding an interest are strong enough, rights follow. The transcendent interests we have been discussing are grounded in strong moral considerations: the formulation and pursuit

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of transcendent interests connect us to value and meaning now; the transcendent interest in forging a worthy legacy vivifies our convictions, projects, and purposes during our biological lives; and our transcendent interest in the reputation we have earned implicates two principles of justice— desert and entitlement. Because the nature of the resulting rights necessarily generates duties that can be fulfilled or reneged upon only after death, the duties survive even though the rights perish with the death of their holders. The nature of the rights related to transcendent interests allows the antemortem person to be the subject of the surviving duties, although he no longer possesses the correlated rights. For example, the antemortem Rocky Marciano (1923-1969) had, among others, a right to the enduring reputation to which he was entitled. Marciano was undefeated heavyweight boxing champion from 1952-1956 and died in a private airplane crash in 1969. Suppose in 2010, someone maliciously defamed Rocky’s reputation. Suppose this villain fabricated evidence to suggest that Rocky won his fights because of an unfair advantage and he defamed Rocky’s personal comportment as well. The hypothetical, successful defamation of Rocky Marciano in 2010 would lead us to radically re-describe the life he led. The existing narrative of Rocky’s life is roughly this: tough, earnest boy rises from humble background to achieve immortality as the only professional heavyweight champion to retire undefeated; along the way, he exudes an admirable modesty, dignity, sincerity, and good cheer; known particularly for his capabilities of enduring and inflicting severe punishment; relentlessly disciplined and celebrated for his long, arduous training regimens; wrenched the most from his talent and deserved everything he was accorded. Now imagine that the hypothetical defamation in 2010 succeeds. We must then rewrite the narrative of Rocky’s life: cheater who cynically and intentionally duped the public with a false image; fraudulently exploited both his competitors and spectators; a phony whose public persona was a self-serving masquerade devised only to secure additional undeserved wealth, false glory, and groundless fame. In this manner, by casting light on the “truth” and undermining our previous understandings, such a posthumous deed would spectacularly alter our understanding of Rocky’s life. History would literally have to be rewritten. Granted, Rocky’s constitutive attributes are unchanged—his intrinsic bodily and mental states are unaffected and his well-being, on some accounts, is unimpaired by posthumous events. But does such an act harm Rocky (given that the posthumous account is maliciously false)? Or does it only adversely affect his biographical life? And can we separate (a) a person’s biographical life from (b) the

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person? That is, can a posthumous event clearly affect Rocky’s biographical life adversely, yet register no effects on Rocky, the liver of that life? Rocky’s right to the reputation to which he was entitled implies that his contemporaries had correlated moral duties. Accordingly, if his contemporaries had maliciously defamed Rocky while he was alive, they would have been morally wrong because they would have violated their duties to Rocky by transgressing his right. Moreover, the same moral right binds those who survive Rocky from maliciously defaming him. Although his transcendent interest does not literally survive his biological death, the moral right the antemortem Rocky possessed generates a duty that literally survives Rocky’s death. The bearers of these surviving duties are easy to identify: those who outlive Rocky. The existence requirement poses no barrier to a modest thesis of posthumous wrongs because this view does not rely upon free-floating interests and does not ascribe interests to problematic or questionable subjects. Accordingly, the hypothetical defamer violates his duty to Rocky in 2010 and thereby wrongs the antemortem Rocky. We need not argue that Rocky has a right to be remembered or a right to continued honor. We need only phrase the right conditionally: If Rocky is continuingly remembered, if his biographical life continues, then the right the antemortem Rocky possessed to a reputation that he deserved based on the life he led entails duties upon those who survive him. The modest thesis, then, does not claim that at death each individual has a right to a symbolic existence or that each decedent must be remembered by those who survive. Although, as a matter of fact, most of us will have biographical lives that extend beyond our deaths, this is not automatically owed to us. This modest thesis of posthumous wrongs has several attractive features: First, it vivifies our intuition that certain posthumous acts are morally wrong, and their wrongness is connected to the justified claims of their alleged victims. Second, it saunters passed the problem of the existence requirement because it does not attribute interests or rights to postmortem entities. Third, it accounts easily for the bearer of the moral duties at issue. Fourth, it is compatible with a robust understanding of the distinction between biological and biographical lives. Fifth, it does not require the claim that the well-being of the dead or the antemortem person is adversely affected by posthumous villainy. However, the modest thesis cannot conclude that the dead are harmed. Under this view, “harming the dead” can be understood only metaphorically as “violating the surviving duties owed to the antemortem person after that person has died.” The antemortem person is the “victim,” but it

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does not follow that he has been harmed by the posthumous violation of the right he held while living. Under this account, the antemortem person no longer holds the relevant interest that is thwarted, and thus cannot be subject to harm. But, then, in what sense is antemortem Rocky the “victim”? Here I would invoke the distinction between biological and biographical lives. Rocky’s biographical life is falsified, distorted, and dishonored by malicious defamation in 2010. It is at that point and thereafter (unless a correction occurs) that the antemortem Rocky has been wronged, even if he has not been harmed. The malicious defamation amounts to a wide-sweeping indictment of Rocky Marciano’s character and achievements. The moral wrong casts a shadow back on the life Rocky led and thereby influences our evaluation of that life. The very attempt to maliciously defame Rocky violates the perpetrator’s duty, independently of whether others believe the defamation. The effects, if any, of the perpetrator’s actions are the measure of the offense. If no one believes the defamation, then no adverse effect is registered on Rocky’s biographical life other than the perpetrator’s violation of duty. If believed by a significant number of people, the defamation compels those still living to rewrite Rocky Marciano’s story, to radically revise his biography. The antemortem Rocky is a victim in that his glorious athletic achievements and generally solid, admirable character are demeaned; his life story is fraudulently altered. The antemortem Rocky, not postmortem Rocky, is the victim because only the antemortem Rocky is the subject and agent of the deeds and events that constitute his biographical life. Only the antemortem Rocky’s character and actions were called into question by malicious slander occurring in 2010. What is the relationship between Rocky Marciano and his biographical life? Is not the biographical life in some sense Rocky’s and no one else’s? If his biographical life is falsified should that not mean that Rocky was harmed? Not necessarily. A person’s biographical life is the account, explanation, and evaluation of her biological life; it extends that person’s existence symbolically; and can constitute, enhance, or undermine that person’s legacy. A person’s biographical life, then, is not simply an accurate chronicle of what that person in fact chose and how she acted; it includes the reactions, relations, and evaluations of others to those choices and actions. Insofar as those who survive us remember our biological lives, we continue to exist symbolically. Only a few of us will fulfill the ancient Roman aspiration of inspiring future generations and serving as exemplars of one sort of another.21 The vast majority of us will be remembered following our deaths for a short time by friends, family, and rela-

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tives, then pass from the collective consciousness. Insofar as survivors continue to remember us, our biographical lives and symbolic existences extend beyond our deaths. But our agency expires with us; we can no longer add to our lives autobiographically. Even if after we die, diaries, papers, letters, unpublished manuscripts, and the execution of provisions of our wills have great effect in the world, the initiating acts occurred while we were alive. The new findings will surely compel revisions of and additions to our biographical lives, but not because we have acted posthumously. The findings are new only insofar as our survivors have learned additional things about our lives after we have died. Under the modest thesis of posthumous wrongs, a biographical life, which is, after all, only a story embodying an evaluation, cannot itself be the bearer of interests or rights; a biographical life cannot literally be harmed. A biographical life is a story about the actual biological life of a real person. A biographical life also begins prior to that person’s birth and extends beyond that person’s death. Accordingly, the biographical life of Rocky Marciano is the story of Rocky and Rocky only. Of course, countless other people, events, activities, and the like figure into that story, but only because of their relationship to, affect upon, and connection with Rocky. Posthumous villainy corrupts but does not literally harm a biographical life. Posthumous villainy violates moral duties owed to the antemortem person who is the subject of a biographical life. Posthumous events can adversely affect the evaluation of a person’s biographical life. The malicious falsification of a biographical life is immoral in that it aspires to fraudulently or wrongly cause revisions; it lures survivors into evaluating that life less highly than that life deserves. Although not viewed as harms under the modest thesis, such acts are moral wrongs. The object of these moral wrongs is the antemortem person whose biographical life is at issue and whose transcendent interests crystallized into rights that generated surviving correlated duties. The time of such a moral wrong is the moment at which the posthumous villainy occurs. If some entities can sometimes have properties when they do not exist then we can properly predicate “a diminished reputation as a prize fighter” to Rocky at the time of the malicious slander in 2010. Rocky’s intrinsic properties do not change as a result of the posthumous villainy; his essential nature and intrinsic properties remain the same. Only existing entities embody intrinsic properties and only existing entities can undergo changes in their intrinsic properties. The malicious defamer undergoes a genuine change; those still living who believe the defamation undergo a relational

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change. Rocky would undergo relational or Cambridge changes, transformations in his relationship to something else. Peter Geach famously distinguished between changes in “Cambridge properties” and changes in genuine or “real” properties, sometimes called “Oxford properties.”22 Cambridge properties are properties attributed to an object solely because of its relationship to other things, and Cambridge property changes are changes in the properties of objects that occur as a result of changes in their relations to other objects. David-Hillel Ruben provides a few examples of Cambridge property changes: “the change in Socrates every time a fresh schoolboy comes to admire him, the change in the number six each time it ceases to be the number of someone’s children, the change in Adam and Eve each time they acquire a new descendent.”23 These changes properly attribute properties to their respective objects, but do not trigger alterations to their intrinsic characteristics: they do not physically alter their objects by changing their constitutive properties. The proposition expressed in the sentence, “Rocky Marciano is reputed to be a cheat and fraud as a prize fighter” was false prior to 1969 (the time of Rocky’s death) and prior to 2010 (the time of the successful malicious defamation), but it is true from 2010 and thereafter (assuming no correction occurs). Again, we can accumulate relational properties after our deaths, but not intrinsic properties. We can also undergo relational changes after our deaths, but not changes to our intrinsic properties. The same subject is involved in all such cases: the antemortem Rocky as described, explained, and evaluated in his biographical life. Still, under the modest thesis, we cannot conclude that Rocky was or could have been harmed in 2010. Of course, hundreds of posthumous acts can influence our evaluation of a person’s biographical life without implicating morality. In fact, most posthumous activity that spurs reevaluation of biographical lives is unrelated to morality. Most such activity involves new discoveries, fresh information, and a reinterpretation of events as time passes. All such acts can be accounted for by the modest thesis: they enhance, diminish, or do not affect a person’s biographical life. Should relinquishing the slogan and the accompanying idea of “harming the dead” cause major concern? Under the modest thesis, the answer is a resounding, “No.” We can still stigmatize posthumous villainy for what it is; we can still account for how the antemortem person has moral claims that persist beyond death; and we can still adhere to the distinction between biological and biographical lives. Best of all, we discard the discredited metaphysical baggage of free-floating interests and suspicious postmortem subjects. While the slogan “violating the surviving duties

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owed to the antemortem person after that person has died” is clumsier and lacks the panache surrounding “harming the dead,” diminished public relations points are more than offset by the greater coherency spawned by the modest thesis. At least one loose end regarding biographical lives remains. What are we to conclude about posthumous puffery? By that I mean statements, celebrations, and events that falsify a person’s biographical life by fraudulently amplifying that person’s character, accomplishments, and deeds. For example, suppose in 2010 that an admirer of Rocky Marciano spreads false, flattering information about Rocky’s life. Suppose he concocted evidence that falsely but persuasively alleged that Rocky fought and defeated Jersey Joe Walcott even though Rocky had entered the ring with broken ribs and a raging fever. Fending off a temperature exceeding 101 degrees and enduring the excruciating pain of every body blow, Rocky nevertheless overcame the defending champion in a gutty, gritty performance. Suppose further that the admirer convincingly fabricated other glorious stories about Rocky’s out-of-ring exploits. The admirer conjures events and deeds that portray Rocky steadfastly aiding those in distress, sacrificing much in order to benefit others, and anonymously rescuing the destitute. Draw the details as grandiosely as you prefer. Finally, suppose that this posthumous puffery is widely accepted. As a result, Rocky’s biographical life is rewritten to portray him as a rugged combination of Jack Armstrong, The Shadow, Father Flanagan, and Mother Teresa—or, as Nietzsche might intone, “Caesar with Christ’s soul.” We are no longer discussing posthumous villainy, yet the accounts of the imagined admirer are as false as the hypothetical malicious defamation case that has informed this work. Yet the intent here is to elevate not demean the antemortem Rocky. But a falsely fabricated pedestal is a perilous place upon which to stand. We might conclude that the falsified accounts, although well intended, still abridge Rocky’s entitlement to the reputation that he had earned by the life he led. His actual, unadorned biographical life was worthy enough. To falsify that life by amplifying Rocky’s image to the absurd level of cartoon heroism produces no honor. If his biographical life should be an accurate rendering and fair evaluation of the life Rocky led, the well-intentioned admirer provides no succor. Instead, the admirer confuses the description and evaluation of Rocky’s life by adding false, flattering fantasies. The admirer’s good intentions are radically misplaced. More important, the admirer has failed in his duty to the antemortem Rocky. Rocky had a right to the enduring reputation he had earned as a prizefighter and human being; the admirer’s posthumous puffery distorts that reputation by skewing the account of Rocky’s life and prejudic-

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ing its evaluation; accordingly, I conclude that posthumous puffery is another way to betray our moral duties that correlate to rights connected to transcendent interests. Again, honoring biographical lives requires a fair, accurate, honest evaluation. While a principle of charity should guide our interpretation of events and deeds, falsifying accounts to artificially amplify their lives brings no honor to the dead. Speaking of the dead respectfully requires that we recognize their past status as autonomous, moral agents. When evaluating their lives, we must not ignore their wrongful and unbecoming actions. Such an understanding grounded Kant’s conclusion that “a wellfounded accusation against [a dead person] is still in order (so the principle [speak nothing but good about the dead] is incorrect).”24 A critic might object that we face here a problem of competing interests.25 I assume that the dead person has an interest in an accurate account of his biographical life; the account should reflect the evaluation the person deserves and to which he is entitled. But, perhaps, the dead person has an interest in being portrayed in the best possible light. In fact, if survivors have an inaccurate, but glorious view of the dead person’s life this may well advance his other transcendent interests more effectively than if survivors have an accurate, but less exalted view of his life. In my judgment, the importance of an accurate and truthful account of a person’s biographical life is connected to meaning and value. An inaccurate, but glorious account is disconnected from reality; it is a fiction. Thick illusion yields only the appearance, not the reality, of meaning and value. A person’s interest is tied to the reality, not mere appearance, of meaning and value. That is, we have a stake in genuinely connecting to meaning and value, not merely seeming to do so in the eyes of external observers. A falsely flattering account of my biographical life cannot reap the result to which my interests aspire; at best, it can generate only the appearance or illusion of having done so. In that vein, a strong case can be made that an overly flattering portrayal of a dead person wrongs him: it fails to recognize him as a fully responsible moral agent; it tacitly suggests that an accurate rendering of his life will be disappointing; and it ignores the complexity and humanity of the subject. As thoroughly conditional beings, we are flawed and imperfect. Any account of our lives that suggests otherwise denies the human condition and mocks the totality of our thoughts, choices, and deeds.

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The modified strong thesis of posthumous harms Under this more radical view,26 an antemortem person’s transcendent interests survive her death because of the special nature of those interests. But they survive not as free-floating metaphysical constructs, but as part of the decedent’s moral estate. These transcendent interests are held in trust by proxies and guardians, the appropriate moral community. Accordingly, although these interests are detached from the antemortem person, they are held in trust by the surviving moral community. Return to the hypothetical case about Rocky Marciano: In 2010, malicious defamation thwarted the transcendent interest embodied by Rocky at and prior to 1969; that interest, along with several other transcendent interests, survived Rocky’s death and is now held by the appropriate moral community. The defamation wrongly but successfully diminished Rocky Marciano’s biographical life; the thwarting of his transcendent interest (in maintaining posthumously the reputation he deserved and to which he was entitled), whose effects are reflected in his sadly rewritten biographical life, harms Rocky; the victim of the harm in 2010 is antemortem Rocky. Accordingly, under a modified strong thesis of posthumous harms, the victim of harm cannot be postmortem Rocky, who is viewed as annihilated; the time of the harm is marked at 2010, the time of the defamation; and the nature of the harm is the thwarting of one of Rocky’s transcendent interests. Moreover, antemortem Rocky undergoes the relevant Cambridge changes and attribution of the relevant Cambridge properties accompanying the defamation, even though he undergoes no Oxford changes nor acquires any Oxford properties; and his biographical life is falsely and wrongfully altered. Does this account, though, suggest backward causation? How can antemortem Rocky (1923-1969) be harmed in 2010? The harm to Rocky is the thwarting of one of his transcendent interests, an event that can occur only after his death. Rocky’s biographical life is thereby wrongly diminished. That Cambridge properties can accumulate and Cambridge changes can occur posthumously are unproblematic. The horror of backward causation is most relevant to the addition of Oxford properties and the occurrence of Oxford changes, neither of which pertains to the modified strong thesis of posthumous harms. The obvious advantages of the modified strong thesis are that it makes no appeal to surviving constitutive attributes and it reaffirms the annihilation thesis: death is our end. The disadvantage is that it apparently denies the existence requirement: a necessary condition for the existence of interests is an existing sentient being who embodies those interests; a necessary condition for the occurrence of harm and benefit is the thwarting or ful-

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filling of an interest, respectively; thus, a necessary condition for the occurrence of harm and benefit is an existing sentient being who embodies interests. The modified strong thesis must argue as follows: an existing sentient being, who embodies interests must initiate or develop transcendent interests if such interests are to exist; transcendent interests can be thwarted or fulfilled only after their initial bearer dies; a necessary condition of posthumous harm and benefit is the thwarting or fulfillment of a transcendent interest, respectively; a necessary condition of thwarting or fulfilling a transcendent interest is that the initial bearer of that interest (the formerly existing sentient being) is dead. Transcendent interests cannot be freefloating or detached completely from all sentient beings, but they can be held or possessed, after the death of their initial bearer, by survivors; transcendent interests are posthumously detached from their initial bearers, but are held in trust by the surviving moral community; thus, posthumous harms and benefits are possible in that surviving transcendent interests can be thwarted or fulfilled after the death of their initial bearer. Under the modified strong thesis of posthumous harms, we may even refer to the well-being of the dead in a certain sense. We can refer and assign a level of well-being to the antemortem person now based on the extent to which he or she is benefited or harmed by posthumous events.27 Those theories that conceive of well-being as more than mental states, experienced phenomena, and effects on constitutive attributes are congenial to including harms and benefits grounded in the accumulation of Cambridge properties and occurrence of Cambridge changes. If we construe “well-being” as experienced mental and physical states and those nonexperienced events that affect mental and physical capabilities, then posthumous events cannot affect the alleged victim’s well-being; but a wider rendering of well-being opens the possibility that posthumous events can affect the well-being of victims. Under the modified strong thesis of posthumous harms, the crucial idea is that transcendent interests can survive the death of their bearer as long as they are not free-floating, because they are held in trust by the surviving moral community. Why should we subscribe to such a notion? First, the modified strong thesis must press home the nature of transcendent interests. Under the modest thesis of posthumous wrongs, transcendent interests perish with the death of their initial bearer, but their normative force persists in the lingering duties of survivors. The modified strong thesis of posthumous harms takes the next step and concludes that transcendent interests survive the death of their initial bearer and that is why their normative force persists. Under this view, transcendent interests make sense

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only if they survive the death of their initial bearers, because they can be thwarted or fulfilled only after death. While they cannot exist as freefloating ontological entities, they can exist if they are held in trust by the surviving moral community. Transcendent interests are not themselves the subjects of harms, although if thwarted their initial bearer is harmed. The notion of a moral estate akin to a material estate energizes the notion that transcendent desires need not be viewed as perishing with the death of their initial bearer. In short, one might well argue that we should subscribe to this view, because it gives the best unified explanation and account of the phenomenon at issue. Second, this account fits comfortably with intergenerational and social contract views of moral life. That the overwhelming number of human beings develop transcendent interests, some of which they expect and others of which they hope will be fulfilled posthumously, is uncontestable. That developing such interests is rational, meaningful, and valuable has been established earlier in this work. Accordingly, intergenerational views of moral life that understand each generation of human beings as a link in an ongoing chain of mutual concern, should embrace the modified strong thesis of posthumous harms warmly. So too, social contract views of moral life should enthusiastically greet the modified strong thesis as part of the voluntary arrangements that could be accepted by either actual parties to the social contract or those selecting moral and political principles from within a hypothetical ideal method of choice. Third, those who insist that a necessary condition for the existence of interests is an existing sentient being, who embodies those interests, are concerned with Oxford harms and benefits. In the special case of transcendent interests, which can yield by definition only Cambridge changes and the addition of Cambridge properties, invoking an uncompromising version of the existence requirement is misplaced. The modest thesis of posthumous wrongs glistens with the crucial virtues that animate the efforts of those who are convinced that the dead remain vulnerable. This account underscores our intuitions that certain posthumous acts are morally wrong and their wrongness is connected to the justified claims of their alleged victims. The account wards off the existence requirement because it does not attribute interests or rights to postmortem entities. The modest thesis easily identifies the bearers of the moral duties that survive the death of the original rights-holder. Also, the modest thesis is grounded in a robust understanding of the distinction between biological and biographical lives. Finally, the modest thesis does not depend on the claim that the well-being of the dead or the antemortem person is adversely affected by posthumous villainy.

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The modest thesis of posthumous wrongs, then, apparently requires few if any adjustments to our common understandings. Accordingly, the thesis seems safe and comfortable. But for those whose artistic and philosophical tastes are more elaborate, the modified strong thesis of posthumous harms is recommended. The notion of surviving transcendent interests, detached from their initial bearers but not free-floating, because they are held in trust by the appropriate moral community, requires some adjustment to our common understandings. But the modified strong thesis of posthumous harms offers a more robust account of posthumous harm and benefit than does the modest thesis of posthumous wrongs. In any case, I hope to have demonstrated that the notion of a biographical life opens rich possibilities for understanding how posthumous events are morally significant. Still, we must confront our inevitable deaths with an attitude of some sort. While we cannot alter the fact of our finitude we can choose how to perceive and how to approach the end of our biological life.

20. Defy the Grim Reaper: Blaise Pascal “The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.” ʊMark Twain

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) conjures a bleak image of human mortality: Let us imagine a number of men in chains, and all condemned to death, where some are killed each day in the sight of the others, and those who remain see their own fate in that of their fellows, and wait their turn, looking at each other sorrowfully and without hope. It is an image of the condition of men.28

Although the metaphorical power of Pascal’s observation is stunning, human life is not so dreary. Most of us are not so obsessed with death that we have only the obituary pages to highlight our days. We are not merely in chains awaiting our turn. We have opportunities to pursue meaning and value. We are not consumed with our demise every waking moment. We attend to projects, interests, and relationships that animate our spirits and brighten our days. As Pascal notes, however, we do watch the physical deterioration and deaths of love ones, endure suffering, and inch closer to the turnstiles of doom with each passing hour. Still, the process that is life vivifies our journey toward our inevitable demise. But prior to accepting that conclusion hastily we should supple-

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ment Pascal’s gloomy account with advice from the prince of pessimism, Arthur Schopenhauer. The glorification of the self, as we celebrate our rights, uniqueness, specialness, ambitions and achievements, is the calling card of the Western perspective that is decidedly individualistic. Schopenhauer, in contrast, accepts the Eastern teaching that the individual self is a roadblock to spiritual liberation. Selflessness becomes necessary to dislodge our anxieties over our deaths. The less we obsess over our selves the less our future deaths will threaten our well-being now. In Eastern thought, life and death are not separate. They are the incremental processes of change. Human beings are embedded in a world that is an unbounded process. Death enables new phenomena to come into being and helps drive the ongoing historical process of our world. The elements that once comprised living human beings persist in a different form as we die. In Eastern thought, the best way to die is not by raging against the dying of the light, but by minimizing ego attachments and gracefully yielding to inevitable transition. And the best way to die guides us to the best way to live. Schopenhauer indirectly raises an important issue: the role societal conditioning plays in our perceptions of death. Western religions, for example, greatly altered these perceptions. While these religions softened the fear of death for those confident their earthly deeds would win them eternal bliss, they amplified the fears of those with a keen sense of their checkered moral record. Based on what we have done on earth, which group is larger: righteous, religious followers cheerful about their prospects of ascending to eternal reward, or ambivalent, fallible sinners terrorized by the possibility of eternal damnation? We search without resolution for consolation. Schopenhauer rises to a vantage point from which he declares individuality an illusion. But that illusion partially constitutes who we are. We do not and cannot understand ourselves as fungible energy, force, and matter. Once we embody these materials, live a certain type of life, forge an evolving character, play a small but distinctive social role, link with a particular generational chain, and connect with specific value and meaning, our “illusion” of individuality becomes part of us. At death we lose that sense. Whether the energy, force, and matter we embodied is reprocessed and redirected, or is simply destroyed may not be a pressing issue for us. Human beings often yearn for personal immortality. Western religions are grounded on that desire. Schopenhauer’s suggestions are unlikely to fill the void. Will we become delirious at the prospects of our recycled energy? Not likely.

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Schopenhauer might retort that he is not in the business of cheering up the masses, only of discovering and reporting the truth. His account of death fits nicely with his pessimistic understanding of desire generally. But two weaknesses undermine his account. First, as discussed earlier, his general understanding of desire is unpersuasive. Therefore, that his account of death fits with his understanding of human desire does not constitute a recommendation. Second, he began his account by heralding it as an antidote to fear of death. While his account might lighten the load of those whose fears flow from the prospects of eternal torment because they recognize the wantonness of their lives and they are plagued by the teachings of Western religions, Schopenhauer offers no elixir to those who already reject dualism and personal immortality. Reprocessed and redirected energy, force, and matter are not obviously preferable to extinction.

The dread of extinction For those who reject the dualism of mind and body, and deny immortality, death terrorizes us because we fear nothingness, extinction, and deprivation, not because we anticipate a painful afterlife. Those things of value in life—interpersonal relationships, projects, goals, aspirations, interests, and associations—end at death. And that is why death often seems so bad. Mere biological survival is not important to us. We do not hope for a permanent coma even if we are thereby kept biologically alive. A life completely lacking value and meaning would be a life not worth living, at least to the person in this condition. Death ensures, stipulating the rejection of dualism and the immortality thesis, that we are permanently deprived of the value, meaning, and good connected to our lives. While many of us also dread the process of dying and theists may fear eternal damnation, deprivation is the main reason we fear death and regard it as an evil. Some deaths are more evil than others, even though the democracy of death commands we all die once. The evilness of a death is directly proportional to the actual and potential value of the life that has been terminated. Death is not always an evil because it is not always true that a meaningful and valuable life has ended. A meaningless and valueless life is one in which the kinds of activities and aspirations previously mentioned cannot be engaged in, nor is there a potentiality for future participation. If life itself, or a particular life, is not a good then its termination is not an evil. When our dearest projects are complete, our creative energies exhausted, and our higher human capabilities evaporating, death can be timely.

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Although death is inevitable this does not make the deprivation of life any less evil. Inevitability means the fact that we shall die is out of our control, but to acknowledge this need not make an occurrence any less evil. Suppose on every first Thursday all human beings would inevitably undergo severe stomach cramps, bleed profusely from the nose, and be afflicted with double vision, would the inevitability of these ills make them less evil or painful or bad? The inevitability of death may mean that worrying about whether we will die is pointless, but that is about all it means. Awareness of death is certainly relevant to a meaningful human life. Although I disagree with those who insist that immortality would necessarily bring boredom or disassociation from past identity,29 I agree that mortality provides a clear context and coherency to our lives. Heidegger argued that keen awareness of the ontological anxiety we confront in our death, shakes us out of the everydayness of habit and diversion that dulls our sensibilities.30 Our desperation can no longer be silenced. Received opinion, inherited social structures, and preexisting political institutions turn us toward stultifying conformity. But getting in touch with the anxiety spurred by impending nothingness turns us back toward authentic living. Learning to confront our death teaches us how to live as authentic individuals. The unspoken dictatorship of social conformity, the leveling tendencies of group-think, and the push and pull toward mediocrity require a strong antidote. The cost of being tranquilized is inauthenticity. Heidegger tends to overdramatize the ontological anxiety of death and overrates its unique role in an authentic life. But his main insights can be refashioned: sharpening our awareness of death can be one path toward more robust and authentic living; confronting death is connected to learning how to live; and tranquilized immersion in the everydayness of habit and diversion dulls our spirits and dishonors the narrative of our life. A healthy attitude toward death includes fully recognizing its inevitability, refusing to live less energetically, constructing our projects in ways compatible with viewing ourselves as part of a long generational chain, pursuing ideals that affirm life’s possibilities, maintaining a zest for the adventures, triumphs, and failures that constitute life, and appreciating the chance to be part of human history. That slogan, “On their deathbeds people don’t regret not having spent more time at the office,” is useful because it gives us a sense of priorities. But the reason we might regret on our deathbeds failed relationships is that at that point we sense most sharply our isolation. We are about to die, we are scared, we are leaving the world, the others we know are staying, some

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of us are terrorized by eternal damnation. We need comfort. Extra time at the office, watching another episode of our favorite television show, completing the cement work on our front porch steps, going to the racetrack one more time, none of these actions provide that comfort. Comfort can be supplied only by those who share our fate or by a benevolent Supreme Being willing to forgive and forget. Or we suppose they are our final best hope. Who but an unrepentant philosopher such as Socrates could sit about calmly speculating about the immortality of the soul while awaiting the hemlock that would consume his life? The way one dies, though, can make a difference, at times even be meaningful. The living appreciate it when a dying person is noble, humorous, and strong, instead of cowardly, bitter, and weak. But the living appreciate it because it diminishes their own fears of death and makes it easier to deal with the dying person: just as during life, our companions can substitute bluster, easy smiles, lame bravado, and retread humor for the serious, intimate conversations about the meaning of life that make us so uncomfortable. Suppose science developed to the point where it could accurately predict, barring fatal accidents, the date of our deaths. Would you want notice of the date of your death? Having that information would make it impossible to forget death on an everyday basis. The information would paralyze action. Imagine someone with a short-timer’s calendar, crossing out each day, knowing the date of his or her death, as time creeps on its petty pace. Forgetting and bracketing may not be as inauthentic as Heidegger claims.

Personal and cosmic perspectives re-visited Once more, we face the personal and cosmic perspectives. From a personal perspective, my death is the end, as long as we do not adopt theism, of the world. My consciousness is obliterated; the planets and heavenly bodies evaporate. From a cosmic perspective, my death is part of the process of change, allowing another person the time and space to enjoy or to suffer. My death itself is insignificant. An intermediary perspective would deny both extremes. My biological death need not toll the end of my biographical life, nor the end of those projects, meanings, and values upon which my life centered. While permanence is denied me, lingering influence is not. As discussed previously, our biographical life continues through the remembrances and activities of our descendants. This social memory extends the narratives of our lives as our stories continue. To be forgotten, exiled, or isolated while biologically alive may well be a greater extinction

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than to be remembered, to be venerated, and to have extended influence, although biologically dead. Our attitude toward death deeply influences our possibilities for maximally affirming life. The end of our existence is less significant than the effects our knowledge of mortality has on the way we live. A life does amount to what a person does, but that need not fuel an inveterate striver’s winner-takes-all mentality. Against Nietzsche, the possibility of a robustly meaningful life is not restricted only to the greatest among us. A healthy, adequate awareness of death can energize meaningful activities. Human beings often take a romantic-heroic path in trying to transcend death by participating in projects that endure beyond their deaths. We achieve a fragile immortality by raising children, sharing grand political and social causes, creating new technological and communication networks, making artistic contributions, and the like. My writing this book, a text that will outlive its author, is an effort in that direction. We connect to value by extending beyond ourselves through relationships, projects, and creative endeavors upon which we stamp our identities. We can achieve a heroism that resists mortality by courageously struggling against a hard lot. An entire line of thinkers such as William James, Emerson, and Nietzsche sees the heroic quest as an attempt to transcend death by participating in projects of lasting worth. Die at the right time. . . the death that consummates—a spur and a promise to the survivors. He that consummates his life dies his death victoriously, surrounded by those who hope and promise. . . . To die thus is best; second to this, however, is to die fighting and to squander a great soul. . . the free death which comes to me because I want it. . . . He who has a goal and an heir will want death at the right time for his goal and heir (Z I “On Free Death”).

We know, however, that we cannot transcend death, our projects do not last forever, the stamp of our identities smudges with time, and for all but a few our footprints are trampled upon, then obliterated. But the experiences, the stream of processes, the struggles, defeats and triumphs elevate our lives with meaning. The heroic quest may be a response to the terror of human vulnerability, limitation, and inevitable death. Perhaps an unearned narcissism fuels the journey. Perhaps human life is impossible to live robustly without illusions. Perhaps truth is not always a high value. Perhaps religious commitment, instead of being the vehicle by which dominant classes solidify power, or by which the herd minimizes the glory of potential nobles, or by which human beings project their need for a Great

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Father, is an especially seductive narrative of the heroic quest for personal immortality. We must choose and act in a partly self-forgetful way. A personal perspective allows us to luxuriate in the heroic quest by temporarily marginalizing explicit awareness of death. Yes, this can become inauthentic: We cannot live entirely in personal perspectives without yielding our reflective powers that elevate us from a purely animalistic life. But neither can we live entirely in a cosmic perspective that calls into question the justification of each conscious moment. The struggle to triumph over life’s limitations, the hunt for ersatz immortality, the yearning for connection with value and meaning, render us noble in the face of our terror. Confronting the Grim Reaper at the moment of ultimate Truth can itself crown the meaningfulness of our lives, or not. This is, perhaps, what Nietzsche meant in celebrating amor fati and disparaging the last man. Embracing life fully means accepting its tragic dimensions including human limitation, individual estrangement, and inevitable death. A full acceptance of life and the surrounding world includes, for Nietzsche, the realization that prior to death our life has been fulfilling and is in need of no further acts to complete it. As the final curtain falls over our life, we savor the whole and wish only that it could be relived over and over, infinitely. Granted, this is a Nietzschean ideal, as death arrives on its own schedule and too often interrupts our best-hatched plans, but Nietzsche imagines a praiseworthy attitude toward death which sees mortality as neither necessary for a meaningful life nor necessarily depriving life of meaning. Mortality is our unchosen context, malleable within limits by our attitude. Living with adequate recognition of mortality, yet responding zestfully, can vivify meaning in our lives and elevate death beyond meaningless termination. Mortality is our context, not necessarily our defeat. We need not glorify death, we need not pretend we do not fear death, but we should temper the Grim Reaper’s victory by living and dying meaningfully. The narrative of human lives, our biographical lives, often continues beyond our deaths. Many human beings recognize this by consciously nurturing legacies, images, creative works, children, and projects that flourish beyond their deaths. We are aware, however, that our projects cannot endure forever and we pursue them in that light. Death, then, does not supervene on life; it provides a context for life. Leaving a rich legacy is not a way of achieving immortality, even though the advice “plant a tree, beget children, build a house, write a book” is sometimes taken in that vein. We are finished at death if no afterlife awaits us. But generating a legacy is a way of enriching the meaning

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of our lives now. Some of our projects should reach beyond our lifetimes. Guiding the next generation, creating something that has a life and identity outside of ourselves, transmitting a culture and heritage, attending to enduring yet finite projects, and influencing the future are not ways of halting the Grim Reaper, but they are paths to meaning. Although our biological lives expire, our biographical lives continue through such legacies. Again, this is not immortality, but it does mark a life well lived. Generating rich legacies energizes faith in life, binds us to something beyond ourselves, and nurtures meaning above narrow self-fulfillment. Approaching our life and death in such a way may even ground the accurate, positive, self-appraisal of our lives that exudes worthwhile happiness. Should this not be enough to stoke the fires of our hearts and rekindle the sparks of our souls? Our impulses to generate legacies are honorable even if permanence eludes us. For in the end, you will die, I will die, and the stars will fade away.

NOTES

Chapter One 1. Raymond Angelo Belliotti, Jesus or Nietzsche: How Should We Live Our Lives? (Amsterdam: Rodopi Editions, 2013), 8-9, 51-113; Stalking Nietzsche (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998), 4-8. 2. Belliotti, Jesus or Nietzsche, 187-194; Thomas Hurka, Perfectionism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 70-71, 76-77. 3. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Citadel Press, 2001), 414-416. 4. Raymond Angelo Belliotti, Happiness Is Overrated (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 105-106; Sartre, Ibid. 5. Raymond Angelo Belliotti, Dante’s Deadly Sins: Moral Philosophy in Hell (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 13-14; Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, volume 1: Inferno, trans. and ed. Mark Musa (New York: Penguin Books, 1984). 6. Raymond Angelo Belliotti, Posthumous Harm: Why The Dead Are Still Vulnerable (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012), 101-134. 7. Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit and Three Other Plays (New York: Vintage Books, 1989); Belliotti, Dante’s Deadly Sins, 150-157. 8. Richard McKeon, “Introduction to the Philosophy of Cicero,” in Marcus Tullius Cicero, Selected Works, trans. by Hubert M. Poteat (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950), 48-49: Raymond Angelo Belliotti, Roman Philosophy and the Good Life (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009), 61-71. 9. John Sellars, Stoicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 64-70. 10. Stephen A. White, “Cicero and the Therapists,” in J.G.F. Powell, Cicero: The Philosopher (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 239. 11. Tom Holland, Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic (New York: Doubleday, 2003), 33, 109, 113, 143. 12. Ibid., 5. 13. Ibid. 14. A.A. Long, From Epicurus to Epictetus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 310. 15. Frank Henderson Stewart, Honor (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), 35. 16. Alexander Welsh, What is Honor? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 43. 17. My account of honor has been influenced by James Bowman, Honor: A History (New York: Encounter Books, 2006); Frank Henderson Stewart, Honor (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994); and Alexander Welsh, What is Honor? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).

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18. Raymond Angelo Belliotti, Seeking Identity: Individualism versus Community in an Ethnic Context (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1995), ix-xiii, 138. 19. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962). 20. Non-existentialists take these values and their subordinate prescriptions as, at best, necessary but not sufficient conditions for leading a good human life. After all, we can easily imagine a person who is existentially intense and authentic, but still a thoroughly immoral person who causes much unjustified injury to others.

Chapter Two 1. Plato, “The Symposium,” trans. by Michael Joyce, Plato: Collected Dialogues, ed. by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), 526-574. All parenthetical references in the text reflect the standard Stephanus pagination. 2. Plato, “Phaedrus,” trans. by R. Hackforth, Plato: Collected Dialogues, ibid., 475-525. 3. Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics (London: MacMillan and Company, 1874, 7th ed. 1907), 382. 4. Peter Singer, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” in Peter Singer, Writings on an Ethical Life (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 105-117. 5. Ibid., 107. 6. Ibid., 337 n.2. 7. Ibid., 107. 8. Ibid., 109. 9. Ibid., 115. 10. Peter Singer, Practical Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 180. 11. Ibid, 181. In the third edition of Practical Ethics (3rd edition, 2011), pp. 214215, Singer loosens the 10% requirement and suggests a sliding scale, ranging from a minimum of 1% upward, depending on the size of one’s annual income. For example, on this measure, those earning $25K per year should donate 1.2%; those earning $50K should donate 1.9%; those earning $100K should donate 4.6%; and those earning $200K should donate 6.3%. For a full listing of that range, see www.thelifeyoucansave.org 12. Singer also famously enlarges his circle of concern to include the interests of non-human animals. See, for example, Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (New York: Random House, 1975). 13. Raymond Angelo Belliotti, Jesus or Nietzsche: How Should We Live Our Lives? (Amsterdam: Rodopi Editions, 2013), 151-157. 14. Peter Singer, “Is Racial Discrimination Arbitrary?” Philosophia 8 (1978): 197. 15. Mo Tzu, Basic Writings, trans. Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), 40. 16. Ibid., 39-40. 17. Ibid., 42-43.

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18. Ibid., 41. 19. Ibid., 42. 20. William Godwin, “Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1798), quoted in Don Locke, A Fantasy of Reason (London: Routledge, 1980), 168. 21. Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, 498. 22. See, for example, J.J.C. Smart and Bernard Williams, Utilitarianism: For and Against (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 116. 23. John Cottingham, “Ethics and Impartiality,” Philosophical Studies 43 (1983): 90. 24. See, for example, John Kekes, “Morality and Impartiality,” American Philosophical Quarterly 18 (1981): 298-299.

Chapter Three 1. Michael Walzer, “Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 2 (1973): 176. For a more thorough discussion of Machiavelli’s depiction of the inner life of his ideal political leader see Raymond Angelo Belliotti, Machiavelli’s Secret: The Soul of the Statesman (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2015). 2. Ibid., 179. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 190. 6. See, for example, Suzanne Dovi, “Guilt and the Problem of Dirty Hands,” Constellations 12 (2005): 128-137 7. Ibid., 137-143. 8. Walzer, “Political Action,” 176. 9. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quinton Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971). 10. Roberto M. Unger, Passion: An Essay on Personality (New York: The Free Press, 1984), 7-12. 11. Ibid., 7-10. 12. Ibid., 22-39, 53-55, 65-67, 69-76. 13. Ibid. 62. 14. Ibid., 24. 15. James Boyle, “Modernist Social Theory,” Harvard Law Review 98 (1985), 1066, 1073-1074; Drucilla Cornell, “Toward a Modern/Postmodern Reconstruction of Ethics,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 133 (1985), 291, 296, 328, 356-358. 16. Roberto M. Unger, Social Theory: Its Situation and Its Task (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 9, 165-169. Unger identifies Foucault, Dewey, and Gramsci as “ultra-theorists.” 17. Unger, Passion, 259. 18. Ernest Weinrib, “Enduring Passion,” Yale Law Journal 94 (1985): 1825, 1840.

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19. Roberto M. Unger, False Necessity: Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 587. 20. Roberto M. Unger, “The Critical Legal Studies Movement,” Harvard Law Review 96 (1983), 561, 598. 21. Ibid. 592-593. 22. See, for example, William A. Galston, “False Universality,” Northwestern University Law Review 81 (1987): 751, 758-759, 761-762; Cass R. Sunstein, “Routine and Revolution,” Northwestern University Law Review 81 (1987): 869, 890.

Chapter Four 1. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage Books, 1991). 2. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, ed. Martin Hammond (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), Bk. 4, sec. 14, 40, 48; Bk. 5, sec. 13; Bk. 7, sec. 9. 3. Camus, Myth of Sisyphus; and The Rebel (New York: Vintage Books, 1956). 4. Camus, Myth of Sisyphus, 123. 5. Oriana Fallaci, A Man (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1980), 129. 6. Robert C. Solomon, The Joy of Philosophy (New York; Oxford University Press, 1999), 117. 7. Camus, Myth of Sisyphus, 123. 8. Ken Ravizza and Tom Hanson, Heads-Up Baseball (Chicago: Masters Press, 1995), 16-17. 9. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow (New York: Harper & Row, 1990), 4. 10. Ibid., 74, 4. 11. Ibid., 19. 12. Ibid., 16. 13. Ibid., 53, 54. 14. Karl Marx, Das Kapital, trans. Samuel Moore (Seattle, WA: Pacific Publishing Studio, 2010). 15. Karl Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State,” in Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (New York: Penguin Books, 1992), 176. 16. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, 3 vols., trans. R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1948). 17. Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 42-45. 18. Ibid., 43. 19. See, for example, Thomas Nagel, “The Absurd,” The Journal of Philosophy 68 (1971): 716-727; Raymond Angelo Belliotti, Happiness is Overrated (Lanham: MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 151. 20. See, for example, Matthew 5:18; Matthew 24: 34-35; Mark 13: 30-31; Luke 16: 17; Luke 21: 32-33; I Corinthians 13: 10; Hebrews 12: 27. 21. Belliotti, Happiness is Overrated, 1.

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22. See, for example, Robin Barrow, Happiness and Schooling. (NewYork: St. Martin’s Press, 1980): G. H. Von Wright, The Varieties of Goodness (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963). 23. Immanuel Kant, I., Critique of Practical Reason and Other Works on the Theory of Ethics, trans. T.K. Abbot (London: Longmans, Green Publishers, 1926); Critique of Pure Reason, trans. J.M.D. Meiklejohn (New York: John Wiley, 1943). 24. Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 42-45. 25. Raymond Angelo Belliotti, What is the Meaning of Human Life? (Amsterdam, Netherlands: Editions Rodopi, 2001), 73-91. 26. John Finnis, “Practical Reasoning, Human Goods, and the End of Man,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, 58 (1985): 23-36; Josef Pieper, Happiness and Contemplation, trans. R. Winston and C. Winston (New York: Pantheon Press, 1958). 27. Richard Kraut, “Two Conceptions of Happiness,” The Philosophical Review 88 (1979): 167-197; Irwin Goldstein, “Happiness,” International Philosophical Quarterly 13 (1973): 523-534. 28. John Kekes, The Examined Life (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992); James Griffin, Well-Being (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986); Lynne McFall, “Happiness, Rationality, and Individual Ideals,” Review of Metaphysics 38 (1984): 595-613. 29. Belliotti, Happiness is Overrated, 75-79.

Chapter Five 1. Jay Rosenberg, Thinking Clearly about Death (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: PrenticeHall, Inc., 1983), 96. 2. Raymond Angelo Belliotti, “Do Dead Human Beings Have Rights?” The Personalist 60 (1979), 203; Roman Philosophy and the Good Life (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009), 132-40. 3. William Ruddick, “‘Biographical Lives’ Revisited and Extended,” The Journal of Ethics 9 (2005), 508. 4. Ruddick, ibid., 510. 5. Ruddick, ibid., 512. 6. Ruddick, ibid., 512. 7. Ruddick, ibid., 513. 8. Ruddick, ibid., 513. 9. Joel Feinberg, “The Rights of Animals and Unborn Generations” in Blackstone, William T. ed, Philosophy and Environmental Crisis (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1974), 61. 10. Ibid., 45. 11. Ibid., 52. 12. Ibid., 13. Ibid., 59. 14. Belliotti, “Do Dead Human Beings Have Rights?” 201-10. 15. See, for example, Daniel Sperling, Posthumous Interests (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 363-80.

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16. Belliotti, “Do Dead Human Beings Have Rights?” 209. 17. See, for example, Carl Wellman, Real Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 155-57. 18. Thanks to my colleague, Steve Kershnar, for advancing this example. 19. Ronald Dworkin, Is Democracy Possible Here? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 79. 20. Judith Jarvis Thomson, The Realm of Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 318-19. 21. Raymond Angelo Belliotti, Roman Philosophy and the Good Life (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009), 36-37. 22. Peter Geach, God and the Soul (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), 71-72. 23. David-Hillel Ruben, “A Puzzle about Posthumous Predication,” The Philosophical Review 97 (1988), 223. 24. Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, ed. and trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 295. 25. Thanks to my colleague, Steve Kershnar, for raising this point. 26. Raymond Angelo Belliotti, Posthumous Harm: Why The Dead Are Still Vulnerable (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012), 171-173. 27. See, for example, Kai Draper, “Disappointment, Sadness, and Death,” The Philosophical Review 108 (1999), 404. 28. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. W.F. Trotter (London: J.M. Dent, 1908), 199. 29. Raymond Angelo Belliotti, What is the Meaning of Human Life? (Amsterdam, Netherlands: Editions Rodopi, 2001), 140-144. 30. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), se. 50-53.

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INDEX

absurdity 147-8 and Camus 123-4 Adorno, Theodor 68 Agathon 60, 61, 62, 63 Alcibiades 65-6, 67 Alighieri, Dante x, xiii, 14, 17, 93 and contrapasso 18-19, 22 and retribution 18-21 and self-creation 20-1 and seven deadly vices 21-2 Allen, Woody 168 Amor fati 1-2, 164 Aristophanes 61-2, 63 Aristotle x, xiv, 98 and analysis of friendship 53-5 and forms of friendship 51-4 and process of friendship 57-8 criticisms of 55-7 Armstrong, Jack 183 arrogance 21, 44-5 Aurelius, Marcus 122-3 authenticity 13-14, 47-8 and Heidegger 47-8 and Sartre 13-14 autobiographical lives 163-4 avarice 21 bad faith 13-14, 16 Beethoven Ludwig 154, 160 Bernstein, Edward 104 Biographical lives 163-7, 177-84, 185-7 Biological lives 163-7 Bonds, Barry 140 Buonarotti, Michelangelo 154, 160, 164 Caesar, Julius 183 camel 5, 51 Camus, Albert x, xv, 22, 148 and absurdity 123-4

and cosmic meaninglessness 122 and defiant heroes 124-6 and Marcus Aurelius 122-3 and Myth of Sisyphus 121-2, 124-9 and psychological flow 126-9 child 5, 51 Chrysippus of Soli 23 Cicero, Marcus Tullius x, xiii, xiv and deserved glory 34-5 and honor 34-6 Cleanthes of Assos 23 Confucius 17, 108-9 Contrapasso 18-19, 22 cosmic perspective 145-7, 148-50, 192-5 Cottingham, John 79 Croce, Benedetto 101 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly 127 death xvi, 164-6, 189-195 and cosmic perspective 192-5 and dread of extinction 190-2 and Heidegger 191 and legacy 193-5 and meaning 164-6 and personal perspective 192-5 and Schopenhauer 189-90 De Sade, Marquis 28 Dickinson, Emily 154 DiMaggio, Joseph 154, 160, 161 Diotima 63-5, 67 dirty hands, problem of 85-7, 89, 95 Dworkin, Ronald 177 Einstein, Albert 8 Elizabeth I, Queen 154 Ellison, Ralph 121 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 193

212 emotions, cognitive theory of 1617, 27-30, 32-3 and Sartre 16-17 and Stoics 27-30, 32-3 envy 21 Eryximachus 59, 61-2 evil 87-8, 96-8 ill-used 88, 97, 98 well-used 87-8, 96, 97, 98 existence requirement 172-4 experience requirement 168-9 facticity 13, 16, 47 and Heidegger 47 and Sartre 13, 16 faith 143-5 Fallaci, Oriana 125 Feinberg, Joel x, xvi and existence requirement 1724 and experience requirement 168-9 and harm 168-9, 170, 171 and hurt 168-9, 170, 171 and posthumous harm 168-72 Fish, Stanley ix-x, xvi, 15 Flanagan, Father 183 Franklin, Benjamin 163 Freud, Sigmund 11 friendship 51-8 Fuller, Buckminster 100 Geach, Peter 182 Gilbert, Elizabeth 22 flory 34-6 and Cicero 34-5 and Machiavelli 89, 92-4 fluttony 21 Godwin, William 74, 76 Goldman, Emma 106, 154 Good Samaritan 69, 71, 72, 76 Gorgias 62 Gramsci, Antonio xv, 119 and ensemble of relations 102, 103 and historical bloc 102 and ideological hegemony 1013

Index and inciting revolution 103-5 and passive revolution 102 and popular political struggle 102-3 and practical limitations 105-6 and scientific Marxism 100-1 and war of movement 103 and war of position 103 Hanson, Tom 126 happiness 150-61 and combining standards 157-9 and meaning 154-9 and Nietzsche 150, 153, 159-60 and objective standards 155 and radical delusion 152 and subjective standards 155-7 and the accident victim 152-3 and the master hypnotist 151-2 and the successful immoralist 151 and trivial pursuits 153-4 and value 154-9 and virtual reality 152 definitions of 150-1, 159-61 harm 168-9, 170, 171 Heidegger, Martin 22, 47-8, 50, 127 and authenticity 47-8 and chatter 47 and das Man 22, 47 and death 191 and facticity 47 and falling 47 and false necessity 47 and fixity 47 and freedom 47 and transcendence 47 Hobbes, Thomas 109 honor 33-46 and Cicero 34-6 and community 45-6 and current relevance 42-4 and individualism 45-6 and obsolescence 41-2 concept of 36-41 hurt 168-9, 170, 171

Why Philosophy Matters: 20 Lessons on Living Large Hussein, Saddam 105, 106 individualism-Community continuum 45-6 interests 169-72 transcendent 166-7, 177-84, 185-7 James, William 193 Jesus 154, 164, 183 and Singer 71-2, 76, 77, 78, 79 Kant, Immanuel 151, 176, 184 Kennedy, John F. 95 Kierkegaard, Soren 48-50, 127, 130, 154 and aesthetic people 48-50 King, Martin Luther 159 last man 4-5, 22, 137, 153, 159 Lenin, Vladimir 104 Lincoln, Abraham 154, 164 lion 5, 51 lust 21 Luxemburg, Rosa 104 Macbeth 146 Machiavelli, Niccolò xiii and accountability 89-92 and categorical moral principles 92, 99 and deserved glory 89, 92-4 and evil well-used 87-8, 96, 97, 98 and evil ill-used 88, 97, 98 and dirty hands 85-7, 89, 95 and internal condition of statesmen 97-8, 99-100 and patriotism 87-9, 93-4 and political remorse 95-100 and Michael Walzer 85-6, 90, 92-4, 98 Marciano, Rocky 178-83, 185 Marlowe, Christopher 140 Marx, Karl xv, 104, 129 and alienation 130-2, 134 and economic base 133 and exploitation 132-3, 134 and human nature 130-2 and ideological superstructure 133

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and self-realization 133-4 Marxism xv, 83 meaning 143-5, 164-6 modest thesis of posthumous wrongs 175-84, 187-8 modified strong thesis of posthumous harms 185-8 Moses 154 Nicholson, William 150 Nietzsche, Friedrich x, xiii, xv, 11, 183 and amor fati 1-2, 164 and aristocratism 8-9 and cosmic meaninglessness 1 and death 193-4 and happiness 150, 153, 159-60 and higher human types 6-7 and indolence 4-5 and inner conflict 1 and last man 4-5, 22, 137, 153, 159 and perfectionism 7, 8-9 and pleasure 141, 142 and Schopenhauer 137-38, 140 and self-creation 5-6, 20, 31, 49-50 and three metamorphoses 5-6, 51 and Unger 106, 107, 113, 119 and will to power 2-4 criticisms of 7-10 Nozick, Robert x, xv, xvi and experience machine 140-1, 143 and pleasure 141-3 and value 141-3 Pascal, Blaise xvi, 188-9 Pausanias 60-1, 62 personal perspective 145-7, 148-50, 192-5 Phaedrus 59-60 Phaedrus 66-7 Plato x, xii, xiv, 25, 91, 93, 109, 138 and justice 17-18 and love 59-67

214 and Phaedrus 66-67 and punishment 19, 20 and self-creation 17-18, 21 and Symposium 59-66 and virtue 17-18 pogo sticks 148, 149-50 posthumous harm 168-72 pride 44-5 Prodicus 60 properties 182, 185-7 Cambridge 182, 185-7 Oxford 182, 185-7 punishment 19, 20 retributive 18-21 Pythagoras 18 Rachels, James 163-4 Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) 39 Ravizza, Ken 126 rights, interest theory of 173-4, 176 Robinson, Jackie 164 Rosenberg, Jay 164 Ruben, David-Hillel 182 Ruddick, William 166-7 Russell, Bertrand 59 Sartre, Jean Paul x, xiii, 22, 27, 127, 150 and authenticity 13-14 and bad faith 13-14, 16 and emotion 16-17 and facticity 13, 16 and freedom 11-12, 14-15 and self-definition 13-14 and transcendence 13, 16 Schopenhauer, Arthur x, xv and continuity of means and ends 138-9 and death 189-90 and futility of striving 135-6 and human condition 134-5 and Nietzsche 137-8, 140 and process values 137-8 criticisms of 137-40 self-creation and Camus 124-6, 126-9 and Dante 20-1

Index and Marx 133-4 and Nietzsche 5-6, 20, 31, 4950 and Plato 17-18, 21 and Sartre 13-14 and Unger 108-11, 117 Shadow, The 183 Shaw, George Bernard 46 Sidgwick, Henry 68, 75 Singer, Peter x, xiv and impartiality 71-4 and Jesus 71-2, 76, 77, 78, 79 and marginal utility 70-1, 82, 83 and Mo Tzu 72-3 and our duties to others 68-71 and partialism 75-80 and rational debate 80-4 criticisms of 75-80, 80-4 Sisyphus, Myth of xv, 121-2, 1249, 134, 137, 148 Sloth 21, 44 Smith, Adam 85 Socrates 17, 25, 32, 192 and love 61, 63-8, 182 Solomon, Robert 125-6 Stalin, Josef 104 Stoics xiii, xiv, 35, 122-3, 163 and basic convictions 23-4 and emotion 27-30, 32-3 and human good 25-7 and nonpreferred indifferents 25-7 and preferred indifferents 25-7 and the natural 24-6 and Zeus 23, 25-6 criticism of 30-3 Strauss, Leo 91 Symposium 59-66 telescopes 148, 150 Teresa, Mother 164 Thompson, Judith Jarvis 177 Thoreau, Henry David 134 three metamorphoses 5-6, 51 transcendence 13, 16, 47

Why Philosophy Matters: 20 Lessons on Living Large and Heidegger 47 and Sartre 13, 16 Tzu, Mo 72-3, 74, 76, 77, 78, 79 Unger, Roberto x, xv and Christian-Romanticism 108-9 and Confucianism 108-9 and false necessity 107-8 and Hinduism-Buddhism 108-9 and heroic ethic 108-9 and human context 107-8, 117 and human personality 108-11, 117

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and progress 111-2 and ultra theorists 110-1 criticisms of 112-9 Van Gogh, Vincent 154 vices, seven deadly 21-2, 44-5 Walcott, Jersey Joe 183 Walzer, Michael 85-6, 90, 92-4, 98 Weinrib, Ernest 112-3 will to power 2-4 Wilson, Douglas 33 wrath 21 Zeno of Citium 23 Zeus 23, 25-6