Why You Won’t Find the Meaning of Life
The “meaning of life” business is booming despite the recession. After eviscerating Jim Holt’s new meaning-of-life tome in an Asia Times Online review, I felt sufficiently saturated with antibodies to watch Terrence Malick’s Oscar-nominated existential epic Tree of Life on pay-per-view. Giggles overcame me after about half an hour.
As G.K. Chesterton said (actually, he didn’t quite, but should have), if you stop believing in God, you’ll believe in anything. For all their self-righteous scientism, atheists turn into the soupiest spiritualists when it comes to problems like birth and death. Malick’s silly flick wants to project the problems of a 1950s Texas family onto a cosmological backdrop, with images of the birth of the universe, or whatever. It so pretentiously idiotic that I wrote off the $4.99 I had paid to Time-Warner cable in short order.
Woody Allen had it down pat in Antz. An ant on a couch tells an ant psychiatrist, “I feel so insignificant!,” to which the ant psychiatrist replies, “That’s a breakthrough. You are insignificant.” I’m not out to proselytize, but the choice is digital: either the Maker of Heaven loves you, which makes you significant, or the idea of a Creator God is as of the same ilk as Richard Dawkins’s Flying Spaghetti Monster, in which case you are insignificant. In the latter case, get over it.
A lot of people want to have it both ways. They don’t want to be religious (that is, to accept that God makes specific and serious demands on them) but to be “spiritual,” that is, to feel good about themselves without any sense of obligations. What unites Malick and Holt in their spiritual quest is a common starting point in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Before Malick was an auteur he was a philosopher, and published a university press translation of one of Heidegger’s books. Holt’s current book — no doubt a bestseller by now — begins with Heidegger’s famous question, “Why is there something instead of nothing?” The trouble is that Holt doesn’t get the joke; he doesn’t even understand that it was a joke in the first place.
I don’t mean to spoil your morning by getting technical, but in case you care about the issues, they are summarized in my Asia Times Online review:
In the first pages of his new book, Jim Holt misquotes my old professor, Columbia University philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser:
“Professor Morgenbesser, why is there something rather than nothing?” a student asked him one day. To which Morgenbesser replied, “Oh, even if there was nothing, you still wouldn’t be satisfied.”
Morgenbesser actually said: “If there was nothing, you’d also complain.” There’s a world of difference, as we shall see, between “not being satisfied” and “complaining”. Part of the difference, of course, is the unmistakably Jewish irony directed at the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, a member of the Nazi party. Heidegger’s famous question, “Why is there something instead of nothing?” is the opening challenge of the German philosopher’s famous essay “What is Metaphysics?” and the jumping-off point for Holt’s peroration through the mysteries of Creation.
But there was a deeper point to Morgenbesser’s quip. To brandish Nothingness against Being is not an analytical procedure, but a complaint – specifically, the Devil’s complaint about Creation. Since the philosopher Parmenides taught a generation before Socrates, philosophers have confronted a paradox: We can neither think nor speak of “Nothing”, for the moment we employ the term, we are speaking or thinking about a thing, namely “nothing”. One can’t get at “Nothing” directly; one can only sneak up upon it through such things as boredom, violence and perversion.
As Holt quotes Heidegger:
The question [of Nothing] looms in moments of great despair when things tend to lose all their weight and all meaning becomes obscured. It is present in moments of rejoicing, when all the things around us are transfigured and seem to be there for the first time … The question is upon us in boredom, when we are equally removed from despair and joy, and everything about us seems to hopelessly commonplace that we no longer care whether anything is or is not.
Every German schoolboy (but few American writers) would recognize in Heidegger the voice of Goethe’s Mephistopheles, who tells Faust:
I am the spirit that denies!
And justly so; for all that time creates,
He does well who annihilates!
Better, it ne’er had had beginning;
And so, then, all that you call sinning,
Destruction, – all you pronounce ill-meant, -
Is my original element.Mephisto is a manifestation of the primal chaos which envies the light, and seeks in vain to restore this chaos:
That which at nothing the gauntlet has hurled,
This, what’s its name? this clumsy world,
So far as I have undertaken,
I have to own, remains unshaken
By wave, storm, earthquake, fiery brand.
Calm, after all, remain both sea and land.Faust observes that the Devil can do no harm in the large, and so engages in petty acts of destruction. “Go find something else to do, strange son of Chaos!” the philosopher scolds.
That is why Morgenbesser’s actual joke – “If there was nothing, you would also complain” – is as insightful as Mr Holt’s misquotation is misleading. Holt doesn’t get the joke; he doesn’t even understand that it is a joke to begin with. The question betrays the character of the questioner, both in the case of Heidegger and Holt. A predilection for Nothing is metaphysical nonsense, but it has an existential meaning: It is the complaint of the bored, the jaded, the jealous, the perverted against life. Goethe’s act of genius was to personify the metaphysical impossibility of Nothingness as a spiritual craving for Nothingness, in the stage personage of the Devil.
Heidegger’s accomplishment was to derive categories we usually associated with religion (“Dread,” “Care,” and so forth) from a purely secular framework, that is, an ersatz religion. Unlike Malick and Holt, Heidegger was as clever as he was corrupt morally. His existential solution was to join the Nazi party and promote Hitler as head of the University of Freiburg. To his credit, he wasn’t a particularly effective Nazi, but he never apologized. Heidegger knew perfectly well that he was playing the role of the Devil, who counterposes perversion and violence to creation.
It annoys me no end when the likes of Holt or Malick promote Heidegger’s existentialism to look for human significance in a universe without God. Yes, you can be spiritual without being religious, but if you are Martin Heidegger, then Adolf Hitler was your spiritual compass. I don’t mean to suggest that all the Heideggerians are bourgeois-bohemian Brownshirts — of course not. There’s nothing in this sort of vapid spirituality, though, to discourage you from becoming whatever you feel like being, including a Nazi, as Heidegger’s own sad case attests. No, I am not accusing the born-again Heideggerians of being crypto-Nazis, just of being silly and boring and incompetent.
For those of you who are looking for the meaning of life: You won’t find it, and the proof that you won’t find it is that you are looking for it, as I demonstrated here. Join a bowling league, learn stir-fry cooking, or build model cars instead.
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Related at PJ Lifestyle:
Dennis Prager on Higgs Boson: ‘Only If There is a God Does Their Discovery Matter’
What is the Definition of God?
6 Varieties of the Agnostic Experience
The Vatican is being roundly criticized by the usual whiners for attempting to call to account the membership of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. Many members having given up on the challenge of living in hope, with authentic faith –and the religious structures that support it– they have resorted either to the illusory certainty of ideology, or taken refuge in the precious religious hobby of New Age practices. If the Vatican can’t turn them around, they will simply die out. Most of them wouldn’t know Heidegger if he bit them, but they are his children. Fortunately, they are not having (spiritual) children of their own, for who would dedicate her life to an ambiguity?
Spengler, unless I’m not getting the point,too, your attribution of “Why is there something why not nothing,” to Heidegger is not quite accurate. It comes from Liebniz’s “Principes de la nature et de la grace.”
And, yes, Heidegger does address the question though as Voegelin writes, “His fundamental ontology is based on an incomplete analysis of existence.”
Btw,this is an excellent essay. My own fan request would be to read your analysis of the nature of the pathology of the left.
You’re entirely right that Heidegger wasn’t the first to ask the question, but he asked in a particular way that gets Jim Holt’s juices going.
As I understand it — and I could be wrong — Malick isn’t an athiest. His film isn’t intended as an existential attempt to impose some sort of significance on the insignificant by appealing to some sort of “cosmic perspective,” but rather to present the mystery of human suffering. His cosmic images are intended to lend some poetic context to the central narrative and point the viewer toward speculation concerning the things of God.
What’s so unworthy about that? Or does his film automatically have to be no good because he once translated Heidegger? Or were you just maybe feeling dyspeptic after reviewing a book you didn’t like?
I thought his film was silly, at least the parts I saw before the giggles overwhelmed me. I also tried without success to watch Heaven’s Gate. Self-styled atheists can make great religious films, e.g. Bunuel:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/IH28Aa01.html
The effort to identify human pathos with the natural world per se is an idea the 20th century got from Heidegger more vividly than anyone else.
Let me borrow and modify an expression from George Orwell’s 1984:
The individual seeks life entirely for its own sake… Life is not a means, it is an end… The object of life is life… Always there will be the intoxication of life… We are the priests of life.
The same can be said of human creativity:
The individual seeks creativity entirely for its own sake… Creativity is not a means, it is an end… The object of creativity is creativity… Always there will be the intoxication of creativity… We are the priests of creativity.
The same can be said of human liberty:
The individual seeks liberty entirely for its own sake… Liberty is not a means, it is an end… The object of liberty is liberty… Always there will be the intoxication of liberty… We are the priests of liberty.
The same can be said of truth:
The individual seeks truth entirely for its own sake… Truth is not a means, it is an end… The object of truth is truth… Always there will be the intoxication of truth… We are the priests of truth.
The philosophy of truth, life, liberty and creativity was summed up nicely by our Founding Fathers.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the [creative] pursuit of Happiness.”
Really? How about all those people who find ways to destroy themselves and their cultures? There are about 150,000 dead languages, so they comprise a majority.
Self-destructive cultures are characterized by lies, bloodshed not in self-defense, subjugation, and the destructive pursuit of happiness – cultures opposed to the principles and values of our Declaration of Independence.
Mr. Goldman,
Have you read Arthur Leff’s book review of Roberto Mangabeira Unger’s, “Knowledge and Politics”?
http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3822&context=fss_papers
I like the way Morganbesser turns the question around and makes it personal. Everything is personal. “Why is there something instead of nothing” is an empty question. “Why do you ask?” and “What would you do if you knew the answer?” are much more interesting.
We find it so hard to conceive of death that we whitewash it. Atheists are not immune to this tendency. Consider this quote from one of Phillip Pullman, CBE’s fantasy novels:
“Even if it means oblivion… I’ll welcome it, because it won’t be nothing, we’ll be alive again in a thousand blades of grass and a million leaves, we’ll be falling in the raindrops and blowing in the fresh breeze, we’ll be glittering in the dew under the stars and the moon out there in the physical world which is our true home and always was.”
Remember, this is from a fairytale novel for children, and its author was knighted for his literary work! His characters look forward to being dead because then their constituent atoms will form parts of other objects.
You’d think this would be too silly for words, but I’ve heard this claim rehearsed by many moderately-educated people. One must reluctantly conclude that there’s something in the Zeitgeist that allows this sort of back-to-front panenmaterialism a hold in philosophically underbred minds irresponsibly turned loose to munch and graze on whatever they find.
I read your review of Holt’s book at Asia Times and liked what you wrote. I often like your pieces, but sometimes find them too quickly considered. Malick’s work may have made you giggle at first, but it’s worth a second look (and perhaps more than that). First, Malick is not a simple Heidegger-ean any more than you are a simple Rosenzweig-er. Malick’s thought has progressed throughout his career from the more purely Heidegger-ean “Badlands” (a story of the raw will-to-power that Heidegger diagnosed as the fatal flaw in Western civilization), to a critical distancing from Heidegger’s thought in “Days of Heaven” (I suppose that’s the film you meant by “Heaven’s Gate” a turkey-of-a-film directed by Michael Cimino), to what I would say is something of a rejection of Heidegger in “New World”. I have not seen “Tree of Life”, so I can’t reflect directly on it, but from the trailers it seems to me to be further away from Heidegger than ever. The resolute concreteness of the imagery used in the trailer seems to rebel against idealism and yields not a “search for meaning” but rather a mannerist representation of life.
Second, Heidegger is a bit of a yesterday’s-man at this point. Only a few innocenti (like Holt) really pay him heed these days. In academia he is especially out, having been run through the winger by intellectuals like Jacques Lacan, Paul de Mann, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Françios Lyotard, Jean-Luc Nancy, etc. Critical theorists have been ripping the stuffing out of Heidegger for the past 40 years. Lacan especially hated Heidegger’s thought and often went out of his way to denigrate him in his famous seminar. Indeed it was in this atmosphere of contra-Heidegger in the late 80s, 90s and 00s that all the recent books about his unsavory past came out. Those who remember the spell he once had over philosophers, theologians and poets in the 50s though the 70s, can shudder with relief that his day is done as a living influence. Would that you would turn your great critical intelligence to those like Foucault, Derrida, Alain Badiou and Lacan who still wield a baleful influence today.
Third, thank you for writing so intelligently over such a range of subjects. I long read you at First Things and learned much from your articles, especially those on Rosenzweig. I may disagree occasionally, but only with the greatest respect for your work.
Thanks for the learned response, and the encouragement. It surely is the case that journalism lends one to thoughts that are too quickly considered and I welcome instruction. Yes, “Days of Heaven” was meant, not “Heaven’s Gate.” I am not sure that Heidegger can so easily be exorcised; he might survive the critical theorists, who have their own problems. Heidegger’s genius (and here I follow Michael Wyschogrod’s critique) was to secularize Kierkegaard’s existentialism. If you want to account for the existential phenomena first identified by Kierkegaard within a secular framework, you have to do something rather like Heidegger did. That is why his influence is so persistent. Perhaps I’m a spoilsport, but I found “Tree of Life” hopelessly pretentious and heavy-handed.
Hopelessly pretentious and heavy-handed pretty well sums it up. Same for Days of Heaven. The latter, at least, had a good supporting performance by veteran character actor Robert Wilke. I’d say one good Fifties Western directed by Anthony Mann hits the mark better than all of Malick’s opus.
Get this: Roger Ebert thinks Tree of Life is one of the best movies ever made. I have no idea if this unaccountable opinion has some connection to his ridiculous leftism, but he IS a skilled critic. I chalk it up to some axe he has to grind. Most people I know who attempted to watch it gave up half way through.
I assume that “Tree of Life” will get the Oscar for best picture, just as I assume that Holt’s book will be a bestseller. Even Fr. Barron thinks it’s a great spiritual film.
I actually watched all of Tree of Life. Even the parts I found incoherent. Some sequences were quite beautiful to watch. Same with Malick’s The New World, which evinced a great feel, almost primal, for the landscape of coastal Virginia. But parts do not cohere as a whole. As for Ebert, I don’t put much stock in critics to begin with and gave up on Ebert when he started kissing up to Quinton Tarantino.
Have either of you worthy souls seen ‘What Dreams May Come’?…………
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Dreams_May_Come_(film)
When I saw this movie at a first-run theatre, I immediately thought of Emanuel Swedenborg’s precisely detailed, but imminently mundane afterlife. The Thomas Kinkade version. Even less Dante-esque that the Niven-Pournelle novel ‘Inferno’, I had no idea at the time Matheson was even a serious novelist-screenwriter. I thought he wrote ‘young adult’ books, silly me……..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Summerland
A theologian with whom I correspond pointed that Fr. Barron liked “Tree of Life:”
http://youtu.be/Sh4FS8OOn3A
I think he’s barking up the wrong Tree.
What made Heidegger such an enchanter to the humanities intelligentsia of the 50s, 60s and 70s was that he still addressed a Western point-of-view, and especially in his later work, was concerned with the West as an on-going cultural and civilizational concern. His early fascism, which evolved into mid-life Nazism, was a horribly misguided attempt to redirect Western culture. His was a malignancy, a cancer, on Western civilization. In his later work, he was still seeking a way beyond what he considered the deep flaw in Western thinking, but, inevitably conditioned by his own evil past, he never found his way out of the Black Forest of his own heart.
But there’s more than one way to promote evil, and perhaps the critical theorists have done worse. The shabby mixture of Maoism, anti-humanism, nihilism, and anti-Western hatred in their works (not to mention de Mann’s Nazi past), raises the bar of evil beyond Heidegger’s, although in a very different way. Lacan hated Heidegger, but that doesn’t make Lacan’s anti-humanism a good thing. It’s arguably worse.
Back to Malick. Yes, he can seem pretentious. But then so can Joyce or Proust. Modern fiction is often self-indulgent. One may prefer Chandler, Hammett or even Dos Passos to Joyce or Proust, but that does not mean the latter are not good writers. I am almost never bored when reading Hammett, and often bored and distracted when reading Proust, but I have learned far more from Proust than I ever will from Hammett.
I just couldn’t get through Joyce or Proust. My bad. On the other hand, I’m guilty of wading through endless material by Musil and Mann. As for Heidegger, I wrote some years ago:
t is a shame that Eddie Murphy never studied philosophy, for then we might have had the following Saturday Night Live sketch about Heidegger’s definition of Being with respect to Non-Being, namely death. The use of dialect would make Heidegger’s meaning far clearer than in the available English translations:
“What be ‘Be’? You cain’t say that ‘Be’ be, cause you saying ‘be’ to talk about ‘Be’, and it don’t mean nothing to say that ‘Be’ be dis or ‘Be’ be dat. ‘Be’ be ‘Be’ to begin wit’. So don’t you be saying ‘Be’ be ‘Be’. You wanna talk about ‘Be’, you gotta talk about what ain’t be nothin’ at all. You gotta say ‘Be’ be what ain’t ‘ain’t-Be’. Now when you ain’t be nothing at all? Dat be when you be daid. When you daid you ain’t be nothing, you just be daid. So ‘Be’ be somewhere between where you be and where you ain’t be, dat is, when you be daid. Any time you say ‘Be’ you is also saying ‘ain’t-Be’, and dat make you think about being daid.”
Hilarious!
I couldn’t get through much Musil … only a few pages on a dare. Mann is a favorite of mine. Again thanks for your insightful work!
I have a soft spot for Vienna, my grandmother’s town, and Der Mann Ohne Eigenschaften is the Viennese novel to end them all (literally).
Sounds good to me. I speak just like every time I impart instructions to someone in the Altstadt of Bonn who wants to straight to the train station. You gotta be long enough in Germany to speak like that. However, if it starts sounding normal, you been there too long.
Dawkins may have no real interest in the question why all human societies are religious in the first place, but once we accept the centrality of this, the question of what is at stake in matters of professed belief vs. disbelief gets shaved. The reality of a central Being is as much an anthropological fact as an article of faith. And it is for this reason that anyone can love and be loved and thus gain significance. And then there is the kind of significance that violators and victims attain.
Mephisto’s line from Faust is my favourite and I like your fascinating comparison to Heidegger.
Yet it seems to me, that Mephisto’s words transport a slightly different meaning in the German original vs. English translation. Mephisto says 8in German) that everything that exists deserves to be annihilated.
Since he cannot unmake all of Creation, the Devil must choose, whom or what he tries to destroy.
Heidegger understands Non-Being just the way Mephisto, (i.e. Goethe) did (no surprise, since his starting point is Kierkegaard, and Kierkegaard starts with Faust). See my Asia Times review in the link.Michael Wyschogrod nailed Heidegger on this count.