The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God (66 page)

MacIntyre was well aware, of course, that the modern world was nothing like Aristotle’s Athens, and could never be. He used St. Benedict as his model, not so much because he was religious as because he started some small communities—monasteries—in which everyone knew each other, everyone depended on each other, everyone could freely practice the virtues. The spread and duration of the Benedictine jurisdiction show that, given the right circumstances, it can thrive. MacIntyre thought that in the current climate the teaching and organization of modern universities could be modified to create the sort of small community that could kick-start a new way of living together.
8

Another ideal society was suggested by John Rawls, whose totally secular model for arriving at a way to live together attracted a great deal of attention. Robert Nozick, whose own work we will consider presently, called Rawls’s
A Theory of Justice
(1971) the most significant work of polit
ical philosophy since that of John Stuart Mill. Rawls argued that a just society—which Christianity had hardly advanced in its two thousand years—is one that will guarantee the most liberties for the greatest number of its members, and that therefore it is crucial to know what justice is and how it might be attained. Arguing against the utilitarian tradition (holding that actions are right because they are useful), he tried to replace the social contracts of Locke, Rousseau and Kant with something “more rational.” This led him to his view that justice is best understood as “fairness,” and it was Rawls’s way of achieving fairness that was to bring him so much attention. To do this, he proposed an “original position” and a “veil of ignorance.”

In the original position the individuals drawing up the social contract—the rules by which they will live—are assumed to be rational but ignorant. They do not know whether they are rich or poor, old or young, healthy or infirm; they do not know which god they follow, if any; they have no idea what race they are, how intelligent or stupid, or whatever other gifts they may have or lack. In the original position, no one knows his or her place in society, and so the principles by which they elect to live must be chosen from “behind a veil of ignorance.” For Rawls, whatever social institutions are chosen in this way, those engaged in the choosing “can say to one another that they are co-operating on terms to which they would agree if they were free and equal persons whose relations with one another were fair.”
9

Rawls was criticized for assuming an ideal original position when in real life no such state of affairs can exist, and for the fact that, unlike in his scheme of things, if someone has a higher than average intelligence (say), this does not
deprive
anyone else. Rawls’s system, his critics said, was too simple.

ART AS ESCAPE FROM TIME

A very different ideal was proposed by the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002). For him, the purpose and meaning of life were to be found in art, and in poetry in particular. For him, art and phi
losophy overlapped more or less totally. His essay “Philosophy and Poetry” was published in 1986.

Born in Marburg, the son of a pharmacology professor, Gadamer worked as Heidegger’s assistant. “I always had the damned feeling that Heidegger was looking over my shoulder,” he said later. He did not become known outside his own professional circle until the publication in 1960 of
Truth and Method
. This established him, in the eyes of many, as one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century.

From our point of view, Gadamer’s most important contribution lay in his exploration of culture, in particular his essay “The Relevance of the Beautiful,” in which he considered “art as play, symbol and festival.” He thought that the meaning, or role, or function of art often got lost in the modern world, and that play—the activity of disinterested pleasure—was also overlooked. For him, art had an important symbolic role, to open up for us “a space in which both the world, and our own place in the world, are brought to light as a single, but inexhaustibly rich totality,” where we can “dwell” out of ordinary time. The disinterested pleasure we take in art is an aid to escaping from ordinary time into “autonomous time.” The other quality of the successful artwork—art as festival, as he put it—also takes us out of ordinary time and opens us up “to the true possibility of community.”
10

Above all, Gadamer thought there is something unique about poetry, that there is, as he put it, a special relationship between poetic discourse—above all the lyric—and speculative philosophy, that there is a peculiar
completeness
of the poetic word, that it is made in such a way that it has no other meaning “beyond letting something be there.”
11
Poetic language, he said elsewhere, is “always bestowing a certain intimacy with the world of meaning.” Poetry is always “a thinking word on the horizon of the unsaid.”

Gadamer insisted that art in the modern age has been “definitively shorn” of its traditional relationship to Greco-Christian religion and mythology and is wholly thrown back on the resources of the word, becoming a self-sufficient
auto-telic
activity. Poetry since Hegel, Gadamer thought, has become more inward precisely because it has severed its connection with religion and is now “more modest”; though that has, par
adoxically, resulted in a poetry that is more radical in its “purchase” on the world. “Poetry is a making oneself at home in the world, of showing how we share the world.” Poetry is a “finality without purpose,” since it shares with speculative discourse—philosophy—an existence at the limits of verification. The religious element in life, in our minds, has found a new home in the “inward dimension of poetic speech.”
12

Many of these observations coincide more or less with those made in chapter 23, on poetry. And that is Gadamer’s point, that poetry is a form of philosophy, especially where it relates to the horizon of language (and therefore meaning); and that, as Sartre said, the dimension of lyricism is something over and above philosophy. In order to live well, we must be able to
sing
.

MEANING AS OPPRESSIVE ILLUSION

Music—or at least harmony—is one of life’s chief assets, according to the British philosopher A. C. Grayling and as expounded in his book
The Choice of Hercules: Pleasure, Duty and the Good Life in the Twenty-First Century
(2007). Grayling is a brisk thinker and a brisk writer. Here, he sees no need to go back to basics—some basics are self-evident—“The case for the humanist outlook is overwhelming.” He goes straight to the point, as he sees it. The average human lifespan is fewer than one thousand months long (it sounds shorter when laid out as numerals), so we need to make the most of it. Good lives must be lived in the appropriate social and political setting. To live well and enjoy a good life, we don’t need religion: we must have an ideal and work toward it.

He proposes that there are seven “notes,” in a musical sense, that can produce a harmonious existence. These seven notes are meaning, intimacy, endeavor, truth, freedom, beauty and fulfillment. Fulfillment, he says, means integrating the other six into one’s own chosen project. To these he adds the arguments that we should all have a lifelong commitment to education—one never stops learning—and that, regarding the question of meaning, unity of purpose is what counts, for “unity of purpose is often exactly what is missing” when people are unfulfilled.

Also, we must be aware of the successes of science, for “eventually we will all use a biological, or even a physical language” (much as David Deutsch and Frank Tipler have said—see chapter 25). And he thinks we cannot live a good life without an involvement of some sort in politics, because nothing can take the place of the individual—liberty, equality and community all depend on each other. And the “sovereign virtue” of the political community should be a concern equal to the concern we feel for our own well-being, because this safeguards the well-being of others. To achieve this we must look forward to a global ethics, the idea of a good world, as the ultimate ideal and the backbone of meaning.
13

Terry Eagleton, another British philosopher, is equally brisk—brusque, even. A hundred-page book on the subject,
The Meaning of Life
(2007), is no mean feat, the more so as he dedicates it to his son, “who found the whole project embarrassing.” He leaps straight in: What is the cause you would be prepared to die for? He observes that during the twentieth century, perhaps because life was so cheap, spirituality became “rock hard or soggy”—unshakable fundamentalisms on the one hand, gurus and spiritual masseurs, the “chiropractors of piped contentment,” on the other.

The fact that there may be many meanings to life, he thinks, is perhaps the most precious meaning of all: “The din of conversation is as much meaning as we shall ever have.” He doesn’t think that God is the answer—“he tends to thicken things rather than make them self-evident.” And Eagleton asks whether the whole question isn’t overblown. “Many people have led superlative lives without apparently knowing the meaning of life.” Desire is eternal, while fulfillment is sporadic, so that intensity counts in a fulfilled life. Meaning, he thinks, is an oppressive illusion. “To live without the need for such a guarantee is to be free. . . . To keep faith with what is most animal about us is to live authentically” (as James Joyce also said). Helping others is a “little death,” a
petite mort
; it helps us to live well but is not the real deal. The meaning of life is less a proposition than a practice—it is not an esoteric truth but a certain
form
of life. Happiness, as we noted earlier, Eagleton describes as a “feeble, holiday-camp sort of word,” maintaining, as others have, that it is a by-product of a practical way of life, not some private inner contentment.
14

THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF TRANSCENDENCE

The American philosopher Thomas Nagel concurs with Bertrand Russell: he does not believe that we can ever be fully content, because there is an inherent paradox or dual aspect to our existence which just cannot be overcome, and we need to learn to live with it if we are to have satisfaction. A religious solution, he says, gives us a “borrowed centrality” in the paradox through the intervention of a supreme being.

A professor of philosophy and law at New York University, Nagel likes to give his books arresting titles:
Mortal Questions
,
What Does It All Mean?
,
The View from Nowhere
,
The Last Word
. In
The View from Nowhere
and
Mortal Questions
, he tackles the problem of meaning in our lives, which he believes stems from this basic, unavoidable predicament—namely, that we inhabit both a subjective world and an objective world. We all face the predicament, he says, of looking at the world from our own points of view, while at the same time realizing that we are but an insignificant part of that world, looking down on ourselves as if from a great height. We are ambitious to get outside ourselves, but can’t quite manage it. It is this “dual vision,” he says, which accounts for our bewilderment and our wish for—and failure to find—transcendence.

He is particularly critical of what he calls “scientism,” which “puts one type of human understanding in charge of the universe and what can be said about it.” But scientism is myopic when it assumes that everything must be understandable by the employment of scientific theories, “as if the present age were not just another in the series” of theories that have been generated to date. Set against this, philosophy has the difficult task of seeking to express “unformed but intuitively felt problems in language without losing them.” At every point, he says, philosophy faces us with the question of how far beyond the relative safety of our present language we can afford to go without risking completely losing touch with reality.
15
Religion does the opposite, in that it places the supernatural beyond the limits, so that those limits are never extended here on earth.

Nagel is at pains to show that we don’t really possess the language to describe our experience. Realism is most compelling when we are forced
to recognize the existence of something that we cannot describe or know fully, because it lies beyond the reach of language, proof, evidence or empirical understanding. “
Something
must be true with respect to the 7s in the expansion of π, even if we can’t establish it.” The world of reasons, including “my” reasons, does not exist only from my own point of view.
16
A further problem between subjectivity and objectivity is that we have an enormous mental capacity that is not explicable by natural selection. In an important way, natural selection does not explain everything.

In
Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False
(2012), Nagel takes this argument daringly—some would say recklessly—further. While he robustly declares himself an atheist, he argues that the reductive account of evolution—that life has evolved accidentally by purely physical and then chemical and biological principles—goes against common sense, and moreover that “almost everyone in our secular culture” has been “browbeaten” into regarding the reductive research program as “sacrosanct,” on the grounds that anything else “would not be science.”
17
It is “an open question” as to whether there has been enough time for evolution to have produced the teeming life we see around us, having begun as a “chemical accident.” Though he distances himself from the advocates of “intelligent design,” he insists they do not deserve the scorn that has been directed at them, because some of their objections to classical evolutionary theory have been well made.

He is careful not to invoke any “transcendental being,” but feels justified in speculating about an alternative to reductive physics as the basis for a theory of everything. Instead, as he puts it, there might be “complications to the immanent nature of the natural order.” What he means by this—and it is his guiding conviction and his main complaint against reductive physics—is that “mind” is not just an afterthought, or an accident of evolution, or a simple add-on. It is “a basic aspect of nature.”