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 The following is a draft copy of an unpublished article I intended to submit to "Think", the philosophy journal, in response to a reply to an article of mine on the meaning of life. My response article has not been published, but my original published article, or a revised version of it, has now been incorporated into a book I am about to finish. Its title is Solution to the Problems of Intention, Induction, Perception, the Past and Other Minds: The Ultimate Mystery Beyond Scepticism. This book, which I have been writing for too many years for me to care to remember them, will shortly be submitted for publication. I am keeping my fingers crossed − not my real ones, which I need for this keyboard, but my imaginary ones, which I hardly ever use.

 

 

The Meaning and the Mystery of Life: Reply to Brenda Watson

My aim in replying to Brenda Watson’s article (Think 36) in response to mine (Think 33) is twofold: first, to comment on her view of the meaning of life and her interpretation of my own; and second, to clarify and develop those ideas in my article which, now that I have read hers, I believe to have been inadequately explained. With regard to this latter, I propose to develop a thesis about a particular consequence of solving some of the main sceptical problems in philosophy. These concern perception and physical reality, induction and our knowledge of the past. My thesis is that their solution would alter but not remove the basic perplexities from which they arise, which therefore betoken not resolvable intellectual difficulties but fundamentally intractable mystery. In support of that thesis and with regard to the sceptical problems in question, I now outline in terms of a system a method of treating them, which by way of illustration I then apply to the problem of our knowledge of the past. Finally, I go deeper into the connection between ultimate mystery and life being meaningless.

 

Perhaps I should begin by recapitulating some of the main points of the original article. I considered the meaning of life in relation to the Christian notion of the soul enjoying posthumous bliss in a non-physical hereafter. I suggested that although this notion is arguably incoherent as it stands, it nevertheless has points of similarity with that of immortality here on Earth and life after death in corporeal form on a parallel planet. I depicted this other world as a physical version of heaven in which a beneficent creator would make his presence known. My point was that life after death thus conceived could not guarantee meaningfulness; for it might seem to a person who died and was displaced from this life to the next that the former had been more meaningful. I made the same point about immortality here on Earth, which again could fail to confer meaning in the sense in question.

I then enquired into whether elevated forms of consciousness have the revelatory significance their subjects are wont to attribute to them. These include religious epiphany and the intense spiritual or perceptual states attained by the mystic or meditator, or induced by means of hallucinogenic drugs. At several points I brought my own experiences into play, for instance that night on a beach in the Gower when gyrating around a driftwood fire spun flame and shadow into, as it were, an exalted perceptual plane. In recounting that transformation of the familiar into the sublime, I emphasised that it did not bear me on a tide of mystical insight over the shifting sand of agnostic opinion and onto the firm ground of absolute belief in some form of ultimate reality. I did not announce to my companions the next morning that all change is illusory ‒ not with the surf hurrying over our bare feet; and in any case, what could it possibly mean? Generalising from this, it seems to me that pronouncements about the nature or existence of the ultimately real are either senseless or false.

            Given this negative metaphysics, what should one say of the meaning of life? Its prospects are not good, one might think, or not unless meaningfulness of the kind in question is to be discovered here on Earth. This brings us to the humanistic thesis that life is what we make it. The implication here is that there is no ultimate cosmic scheme, such as to imbue each individual life with the deeper significance that adult humans seem to crave. This in itself is negative in its import, but there must also be a positive message, at least if the proselytising humanist wishes to attract converts. It is at this point, however, that obscurity creeps in.

What might it be, after all, for human life to accrue ultimate meaning? If the humanist has a message here, it will have to be very potent if it is to overcome the negative import of mortality, misery and change. All these, in their corrosive effect on our wide-eyed state of grace when we are young, eat into us until a dreadful realisation takes shape: that the human race matters only to itself and that to die is to cease to exist. Long after my death, as I said in the article, the clubs and discos of Cardiff will continue to resound to the defiant beat of the here-and-now; but always and forever they will be empty of me. The point here is that my fear is not of dying, as some would have it, but of being dead, the inconvenience of which cannot be overestimated. For it means that never again will I leap and spin on an empty dance floor, the crowd still drinking, their glasses raised It is a tragedy of the human condition, unique to our species, that we have the concept of the meaning of life at the same time as it is only negatively, in terms of life being meaningless, that we are able, religion and mysticism apart, to give it application. Thus it is that we struggle to free ourselves from that condition ‒ or, like condemned prisoners, we resign ourselves to watching whatever is on T.V. The humanist may endeavour, as it were, to make the programmes seem interesting; but like the rest of us, revellers and many churchgoers alike, he averts his gaze from the cemetery at the end of the road and from the suffering along the way.

Having dealt with mortality and misery, we are now left with the fundamental fact of change, which in the article I linked to the mysterious and the meaningless as aspects of what it is to be human. We speak, after all, of the ultimate perishability of all things, including the oceans and mountains and even Earth itself; and this reminds us that not only the individual but also the species, Homo sapiens, has a finite span. Of more immediate concern, however, is the continuous change by which we pass from one moment to the next as our lives are played out. This connects with philosophical problems, about perception and reality, about physical identity and that of the self through processes of change, and about the notion of time, particularly in the form of time past. It is instructive to view such problems as having their intellectual roots in perplexity about the fact of change and other fundamental aspects of the world and our place within it. We are deeply puzzled, or rather we are faced with irreconcilable conflicting perspectives, when, as it were, we allow one concept to interrogate another. There is, for instance, the concept of an event or process when it confronts that of a solid object retaining its identity through time; or that of the present set against that of the past; or, again, that of direct acquaintance with an object as against that of mentally representing it; or the discontinuity between looking at a person’s face and being aware of her conscious mind; or, finally, the conflict between subjective and objective aspects of perception. If these are linked to philosophical problems, many of them concerning change, then their solution might be a lifesaver to those who are sick to death of all that they put together being rent asunder by the ravages of time. One way to test this hypothesis is to outline solutions, a task to which I now turn.

Let me begin with the notion of a system, one applicable to knowledge of the past. If we seem to recall placing a pebble in a drawer, then we confirm it by correctly expecting to find it there. But now, we have to remember why we are rummaging through the drawer, otherwise nothing is confirmed. What this indicates, as can be argued in detail, though here it would take too long, is that memory, recognition and expectation, as also inductive inference, form a system of interdependent relations, one which encompasses processes of perception. To directly confirm my memory, I have to perceive the drawer and the pebble, a process which itself involves memory, as also inference, recognition and expectation. Thus it is that in recognising the two objects, I expect them to change their apparent shape according to perspective, my expectation involving an inference, dispositional in nature and appealing to past acquaintance with such objects or to my perceptual experience as a whole; and perhaps coupled with expecting the objects to feel a certain way when touched. As regards the object in the drawer, my default perceptual judgement, in terms of probability, is that it is a pebble; but this may not be borne out by further examination, the result of which could favour normally more remote possibilities: that it is an egg, or a fake pebble, or a ... and so on. In the light of these, I may have to revise my apparent memory of having placed a pebble in the drawer, or I may suspect that a substitution has taken place. All this, or what it implies in the form of a theory employing the notion of a system, may be used to counter philosophical scepticism.

Take, for instance, scepticism about knowledge of the past, or, indeed, about the reality of past events. A sceptical theory, like any other, depends on the deliverances of memory, for the sceptic cannot invest a sentence with meaning without remembering its first part or the gist of it. If he says, ‘One has no reason to trust one’s memory’, then he has to remember that the sentence started ‘One has no reason...’ as opposed to ‘One has reason...’ If this is put to him and he replies, ‘Ah, but I have no reason to trust my memory of that first sentence’, then he would have to say the same about that sentence, and so on ad infinitum. Note, too, that neither can he coherently be a sceptic about the intentionality of meaning; for if he states that, ‘Words are just sounds and shapes’, then this statement applies to itself, therefore it does not; and the same is true if he attempts to be consistent by saying, ‘The words in my first statement were just sounds and shapes.’ In this way one is able to develop the thesis that philosophical scepticism about the structure of the system is self-refuting.

Let us now connect all this with mystery and with life being meaningless. If it is in terms of the notion of a system that we are able to defeat some of the main forms of philosophical scepticism, then our victory is complicated by various considerations. To begin with, there is no escape from the system, despite the sceptic assuming that he can stand outside it. Indeed, we cannot even speak of escape, or not if this is to imply that the notion of a vantage point outside the system makes any clear sense. Another way of putting this, however, is to speak of a mystery, in this case of such impenetrability that we cannot even imagine what its resolution might consist in.

Secondly, I have suggested that philosophical scepticism is generated by friction between fundamental concepts. This gives rise to conceptual fault lines along which cognitive stress builds up, one effect of which is that discontinuity of thought becomes philosophical problem or paradox, where this is to imply the possibility of a solution. What I have tried to show, albeit in barest outline, is that there are indeed solutions, for instance to the problem of the past. What I also wish to maintain, however, is that the notion of a system on which they depend, in terms of which the sceptic refutes himself, cannot be used to ease the pressure exerted on one concept by another, or to re-align them, given their conflicting intrinsic differences. This follows from the fact that refuting the sceptic has served only to restore me to the common-sense world of everyday belief from which I started. I know, as I always have, that this table and the items on it, including a fossil ammonite, exist objectively, so that they are independent of being perceived; also, that past events did occur and were real, just as present events do occur and are real; also, that these words I write have meaning, which is conveyed by marks on paper, just as my memory of past events is also intentional, where this contrasts with memory images regarded as occurrent mental phenomena, like sensations.

It is because I know these things, secure in my grasp of the concepts involved, that I suffer such perplexity and struggle to no avail in the grip of the incomprehensible. How can it be, I demand of the empty sky, that each moment of my experience, however intensely charged, is such that in the very act of living it I lose it, as if it had never been? How can it be, I implore of the deepest ocean, that this oh so solid pebble, worn smooth by antediluvian tides, is such that if I focus on what it is to perceive it, on the phenomenal character of seeing and touching it, then objective becomes subjective, and pebble and ocean collapse into my experience of them? Note, too, the combined effect of asking both at once: What of the solidity of this pebble, given not only the subjectivity of my perception of it but also that my present perceptual experience falls away into the nothingness of the past?

These are rhetorical questions, no answer being possible or conceivable. It follows that if argument and theory in philosophy leave untouched the impenetrable nature of the world, then we should speak not of paradox or problem, which implies the possibility of resolution, but of ultimate mystery. What I have tried to make clearer, compared with the original paper, is that those who seek the meaning of life, or are anxious to make their own lives meaningful, will not find inspiration in the notion of ultimate mystery here presented. What it signifies for the meaning of life, this being the message in a bottle that the tide washes ashore, is that life is meaningless.

Let us now turn to Watson’s response to the article, starting with the connection between mystery and the meaning of life. What I overlooked, thereby misleading her as to the way in which I connected them, is that in Christian theology one takes mystery to be divine revelation of that which is beyond understanding, as in the Mystery of Christ. My own concern, however, was with ultimate mystery in the non-mystical sense explained in the present work, the connection with the meaning of life being entirely negative.

She takes issue, too, with my saying that arguably the idea of a hereafter is incoherent, since to be alive is to be corporeal in a physical world. Again, I acknowledge that this was misleading: in fact, I think it conceivable that one could survive in an apparently disembodied state, by which I mean that experientially one’s world could shrink down to a wholly non-physical, non-perceptual state of consciousness, any link to the external world, including one’s body, being only through memory. That said, I stand by the general point: that the Christian notions of God and heaven are incoherent. What, after all, does the Christian expect to happen when she dies? The solipsistic prospect of her consciousness narrowing down to a non-perceptual state of awareness, with only her thoughts and memories for company, would surely not appeal; though anything beyond this, in my opinion, would lead to expectations at variance with her stated beliefs, which themselves are incoherent ‒ and this, I think, is just what we find. On the one hand she envisions her soul floating free of her corpse and entering into communion with other souls in heaven, which is not a place but a divine realm of being in which the Almighty is immanently present. It is the use of this nebulous Christian terminology that I find incoherent or lacking sense. On the other hand, perhaps in order to invest such terms with concrete meaning, the Christian speaks of ascending to heaven, of being in the presence of God the Father, and of meeting loved ones already dead. Clearly, some of this is metaphor, as with talk of God the Father; but here one suspects that the notions of patriarchal authority and paternal protectiveness enter deeper into the idea of an almighty god than is compatible with its definition. God, after all, is conceived of as an omnipotent, omniscient non-physical and therefore non-perceivable being, none of which is an accurate description of most people’s fathers. Still, this is not a suspicion susceptible of much in the way of proof, whereas the fact of metaphor in Christian doctrine is obvious enough. It is with this in mind, perhaps, and not wishing to be accused of literalism, that nowadays one hesitates to take that doctrine at face value. It seems to me, however, that there are questions that demand an answer, for instance with regard to the expectation of being reunited in heaven with pre-deceased loved ones, or meeting one’s forebears long-since dead. If heaven is populated by non-perceivable souls, and if therein ensconced one recalls that on Earth one combined genealogy with an interest in the Palaeolithic period, which one retains, then how are the souls of one’s stone-age ancestors to be picked out from others? It is tempting to ask about the language problem, once communication has been established, but that would be facetious.

Nowadays the usual rejoinder to such common-sense questions is to appeal to metaphor and Mystery, where this latter concerns the privileged insight, albeit partial, by which the devout Christian glimpses transcendent religious truth. On that basis, she believes that the full glory of God, which at present lies over life’s horizon, will be revealed to her as the sun rises over her last day on Earth. In the meantime, she will acknowledge, one has to make do with metaphor. This is not, however, a satisfactory reply to those who believe, as I do, that it is only up to a point that the Christian belief system is open to figurative interpretation. A convert to that system, even if he does not take literally the scriptural depiction of the heaven which he now thinks awaits him, must at least believe that there is life after death, his attitude to which one would expect to undergo a transformation. The prospect of family reunion beyond the grave is not, of course, central to the Christian faith; but the point illustrated has a general application regarding interpretative limits.

The above critique of the Christian world view was only hinted at in the original article, which is perhaps partly why Watson, in her reply, took my rejection of that view to align me with the empiricist and physicalist. Another reason, perhaps, is that she followed Leech (Think 32) in assuming a link between atheism and physicalism, this latter being the thesis that all is physical, including the mind, which is identical with the brain. I know of no such link, and certainly it does not hold in my own case. The previous critique owes nothing to it, and this will become apparent, if not already so, when I now criticise Watson’s conception of eternity. She suggests that Christians associate eternal life, rather than immortality, with the hereafter, and in drawing a distinction between the two she quotes Wittgenstein, ‘If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.’ This is either very profound of him or it is nonsense, my preference being for the latter. If eternal life is timeless, not in the sense in which the music of Mahler is timeless, but in the sense of being outside time, then what could it possibly mean to say that life after death is eternal? The concept of consciousness entails that mental phenomena are subject to the passing of time. When we are told that we should live in the present, this is just a convenient locution, not a prescription for halting the ageing process.

How, it might be asked, would Watson respond to this form of argumentation? The answer, I think, is going to have to be indirect, the place to start being with her concern that one should keep an open mind about the Christian conception of ultimate truth inaccessible to humans here on Earth. It seems to me, however, that one should not open one’s mind to that which is incoherent, this being the thrust of my criticism of Christian theology. Even if I open my mind as wide as is consistent with retaining at least a modicum of sense, I still cannot accommodate Wittgenstein’s thesis about eternal life, which continues to seem unintelligible. That said, there is a genuine question about limitations of understanding, this being the terrain on which I have discussed the ultimate mystery of the human condition. Watson’s approach to that question is to suggest that it makes sense not only to speak of limits, given earthly restrictions on what can be known, but also to speak of that which lies beyond them. By way of argument, she adduces Edwin Abbot’s Flatland story about life in two dimensions. The gist of it is that when a sphere enters Flatland space and meets a square, which perceives it as a circle, the sphere is able to disabuse it of that notion only by introducing the square into the world of three dimensions. The moral of the story, at least from Watson’s point of view, is that it may be only through experiencing ultimate Christian truth that one is able to comprehend it.

This is very neat; indeed it is too neat, for the story assumes as a fact, which of course it is, that the notion of a sphere and the space it occupies is intelligible. It then works backwards to the Flatlanders having closed minds. There is no analogy here with, for instance, the Christian idea of deity, which cannot be taken in advance to make sense in order to show that the denial of it is narrow-minded. Watson speaks of opening one’s mind to the possibility of inaccessible ultimate truth, but this again is back to front, for it is just this possibility that is in question. What it all boils down to is that if there are truths which elude us because of our limited understanding, then we cannot have any expectations pertaining to them, or invest any emotional capital in them, or have any reason to believe that they obtain. Besides, there are theologically important statements that the Christian apologist does claim to understand and to know to be true, such as that heaven is an ethereal realm inhabited by human souls who at the same time are in contact and recognise one another. I have argued, however, that such a description borrows illicitly from the physical and the perceptual, so that it is incoherent.

None of this is to deny that parts of Christian theology could be re-configured so as to make sense, at least when based more on life here below, as with conceiving of heaven as having physical form, the nature of which is revealed to the dead through their senses. That is, one dies and wakes up in a new body, this being similar to looking in a mirror at a completely unfamiliar face staring back, one whose expression turns from horror to delighted expectation of heavenly bliss. As for filling in the details, one could look for inspiration in just those exalted states of consciousness that Watson and I are in disagreement about, provided that one’s imagination is suitably constrained. It is possible to enjoy altered perceptual states in which, to go back to the Gower example, one’s surroundings become an enchanted other world, one in which the self floats almost free in the warm glow of the sulphur moon, to which one lifts one’s face in rapture. Oceanic experiences of this kind are grounded in physical reality, which is transformed rather than replaced by a nebulous spiritual realm, so that one’s enhanced consciousness represents the kind of blissful state that is achievable here on Earth. The final step in this radical rejigging of the Christian faith would be to claim, perhaps by appealing to religious epiphany, that such experiences in earthly form are but a foretaste of the spiritual and perceptual bliss awaiting us beyond the final port of call. The question of justifying such claims would still arise, of course, but I shall not pursue it here.

I think, in fact, that enough has been said, none of it much comfort, really, to those who scan the moonlit waters for signs of a deeper meaning to their lives. Still, the problem is not a pressing one, not when the sea is flat calm and the ship has a phosphorescent wake, one’s thoughts easily distracted from journey’s end. Soon, as I sit here and write, it will be sunrise and a new day, unless the final edge of Earth comes looming over the horizon; but that apart, its turning will reveal once more the world’s profundity.