The Human Predicament (David Benatar)
OVERVIEW
After reading Straw Dogs by John Gray, I knew I wanted to pick up The Human Predicament by David Benatar. There’s something about being wired for optimism but a lover of rational inquiry that compels me to seek out pessimists and pressure test my ideas. Benatar, being interested in mortality and meaning, is one philosopher whose interests overlap with mine – all the better that his conclusions are unorthodox. The Human Predicament is not uplifting, but neither is the nihilism gratuitous. Sober skeptics will appreciate this unemotional and objective review of our situation.
“In a sentence: Life is bad, but so is death.” Life can have some meaning, but not very much, and this meaning does not redeem life from the badness of death and suffering.
Meaninglessness
Worries about meaning are ultimately worries about one’s insignificance and the pointlessness of life. Benatar’s approach to meaning is deep pessimism (but not total nihilism). He does think that meaning on the individual, terrestrial level is attainable. If you feel you have achieved something personally significant, then your life has subjective individual meaning. (If your achievement was amassing the world’s largest bubble gum collection, others might argue your life had no objective or actual meaning because it did not meet external conditions of meaningfulness). Your life likely means something to your friends and family, and so you have meaning that extends slightly beyond your person… but few of us will mean anything to our country, or to humanity. However, most of us yearn for something even bigger: cosmic meaning… to be of grand significance, to mean something to the universe.
Unfortunately for us, no one can achieve cosmic meaning because cosmic meaning does not exist.
To satisfy cosmic meaning would require cosmic agency and purpose. But the universe is not alive, it has no agency, and you were not “created” with any goal or purpose… you weren’t “created” at all. There are causal explanations for your existence but there is no reason for your existence. The judgment that a human life is significant is exactly that, a judgment, something only a conscious, sentient being possessing goals can bestow. You can matter to your friends and family, to your countrymen, maybe even (rarely) to all humans… but you cannot matter to nature, or to the universe. The cosmos is not conscious, not an experiencing subject – it has no goals, and so it cannot judge or deem or assess your life to be meaningful from its perspective – it has no perspective.
Truly, the desire for cosmic meaning is futile in the most fundamental of ways.
“Earthly life is thus without significance, import, or purpose beyond our planet. It is meaningless from the cosmic perspective. . . Whatever other kinds of meaning our lives might have, the absence of this meaning is deeply disturbing to many.” Benatar wagers that people cope with this horrible reality by either denying the importance of cosmic meaning or insisting on its existence (either through belief in a supernatural creator or a vague “cosmic consciousness”). Either way, it’s denial. What’s also denial is our attempt to minimize the bleakness of these circumstances – by feigning optimism, by pretending to ignore the truth, or by reasoning that at least our lives are not as bad or as meaningless as some other lives. Comparison doesn’t increase the absolute quality of living; palliating a predicament is not the same thing as curing it. On the whole, life is an unenviable condition, and meaninglessness is just one contributing feature (other contributing features include illness, pain, murder, violence, taxes, traffic, and other various sufferings).
It is worth noting that a meaningless life doesn’t mean a worthless life, or one without value. If someone hasn’t made an important mark on the world, we don’t consider their lives forfeit. Life seems to have some intrinsic value to us, but that is not the same thing as possessing meaning… and certainly not from much beyond your sphere of friends and family. Worth is not importance, and value is not significance.
This is all pretty grim. But what about death? Does death save us from the badness and meaninglessness of life?
(I enjoy all the challenging perspectives in The Human Predicament and don’t want to undermine Benatar’s great work with misplaced humour… but I am, at this point, casually wondering how dire a situation must be before we consider that death is the only thing to redeem it. Quite dire, is what I assume Benatar would say).
Death
Death does not save us from the badness of life. In fact, it contributes to the badness and to the meaninglessness. Would immortality be better? No… but that doesn’t make death good. Life is bad, death is bad, and immortality would also be bad.
Life is terrible, and while death releases us from a terrible life, it’s not a benign arrangement – personal annihilation is a costly solution to the problem of life. Benatar says: “…death is not deliverance from the human predicament, but a further feature of it.” We are forced to live within the anxious terror of our mortality, and any meaning that we’re able to muster in life is threatened by death because death threatens life. Once you’re alive “there is at least an interest in continued existence that death thwarts.” Once you’re alive you do at least look forward to whatever goods the future may hold (even if they are outweighed by the sufferings)… and so death not only obliterates, it also deprives. Benatar is not consoled by the Epicurean reasoning that death is nothing to us because we’ll never experience being dead, just like we didn’t experience anything before we were born. That’s not the issue… the issue is that we’re alive right now, with a vested interest in existing, a will to live that is certainly not a feature of pre-natal existence. What’s more, it’s instinctive for living things to crave more life, but more life brings us even closer to the possibility of death. There’s a proximity issue here:
“Old age, it is said, is where everybody wants to get but nobody wants to be. The latter is partly because of the frailties that often accompany advanced age, but the increasing threat of death is another. There is thus a cruel irony here. We want long lives, but the longer we live, the more reason we have to fear that less life remains. This is yet another feature of the human predicament.”
If at this point you are idly wondering whether immortality would be better, the answer is no. Remember, life is bad… and so eternal life would almost certainly be bad. (Look no further than Greek and Roman mythology for several proofs). Imagine eternal life without eternal youth. Or imagine your eternal life was miserable but you could never die, never escape. Or maybe you could live forever but no one else could… you’d be forced to lose everyone you love, over and over again. Would it be better if everyone was eternal, and our planet collapsed under the weight of a billion immortal humans? Maybe you hope for some metaphysical immortality… a soul that survives on some other plane of existence. Would that even be a human life? Would there be any way to escape the tedium, the boredom to the point of insanity? Benatar doesn’t think an immortal life would necessarily be a meaningless one, but I don’t think he’s trying hard enough to imagine why finitude makes things matter. But immortality being bad does not make mortality good. They can both be bad. Contemplating all the ways immortality could be terrible and using that to make yourself feel better about reality is a sour grapes attitude.
“We are born, we live, we suffer along the way, and then we die – obliterated for the rest of eternity. Our existence is but a blip in cosmic time and space. It is not surprising that so many people ask: “What is it all about?” The right answer, I argue. . . is “ultimately nothing.””
WHAT NOW? (actions for mortal atheists)
Don’t procreate
If you’re unfamiliar with David Benatar’s work, he’s an anti-natalist, which means he holds the philosophical position that procreation is immoral – that the best way to prevent the sufferings of life and the pain of death is to stop bringing new people into existence. To the assertion that children are what give life meaning, Benatar responds that’s a “procreative Ponzi scheme. Each generation creates a new one in order to mitigate its own situation.” Be a pessimist when it’s warranted, and be an optimist when it’s warranted, just don’t let your optimism go so far that you forget that all life includes suffering and death. You can distract or compartmentalize, but don’t deny. Ignorance can be an effective “existential analgesic, but those who do not sufficiently feel the weight of the human predicament are also vectors for its transmission to new generations.” You can devote your life to others, to helping them and enhancing their living, just don’t make more of them.
Benatar’s position is undoubtedly controversial, but I don’t think most honest people reading his books or arguments will come away with the impression that he’s being inflexibly pessimistic. What I see is a contemplative who has soberly and sincerely examined the facts and found little reason for optimism. (Before you ask, no, Benatar doesn’t think everyone should commit suicide, or that genocide is the solution to life being bad. The philosophical position of anti-natalism is probably more vulnerable than most to straw-manning, so just read his books and make up your own mind).
IN SUM:
Is this book entirely secular? Yes.
If I had to describe the book in one sentence? Life is meaningless, death is bad, immortality would also be bad, and suicide can be intelligible (but none of those things are necessarily contradictory).
Who should read this book? Sunny optimists who need a reality check, and pragmatic pessimists in search of corroboration.