One answers this by stating, first of all, that while science (which is a branch or extension of rationality) exists for its own goodness and also that it might be of use to us, the prizing of it in modernity, and the championing of it that can be, at moments, almost mean-spirited in its response to those who, at least in America, are often characterized as ‘backward’ or anti-intellectual, is a continuation of that which, during the Enlightenment, centuries ago, was a reaction to the modes of knowing and valuation that had been foregrounded in the Middle Ages, which had preceded that time. In other words, it is not new, though of course it is manifesting in different ways, and in different moods, and perhaps even to a different degree. So that if one is to understand the role of science, and appreciate its function (rather than merely mention it or refer to it as necessity demands, as if it were some all-encompassing solution to every dilemma) one must recognize its context. Which is large enough to include it not as the sole epistemology, but as one among others. Always to be turned to in certain situations, and applied as far as it will go, but not necessarily without pause, or cessation.
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To give utterance to metaphorical truth, as I have just now (in speaking of Eden and of our ‘fall’), when our culture has become so saturated in a discourse of literal truth alone that it is not only suspicious of truth in any other form, but has been conditioned to believe that truth cannot exist in any other form, is to open one’s self, in some quarters, to derision, or to the criticism that one is invested in a cosmology that isn’t to be taken seriously, inasmuch as it cannot be verified by the scientific method, and cannot be proven or disproven, as if knowing a thing with certainty (insofar as certainty in any regard is possible) is the only basis by which a thing can validly accommodate itself to a person’s conception of reality.
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Which isn’t to sound a negative tone for the purpose of sounding negative, but only to say that, even when we use our gifts for the most just and worthy ends, and bring to our days a stewardship that is most becoming of us as creatures made in the image of God, all of reality, since our fall (and our expulsion from Eden, when death was introduced into the world), has succumbed to a sort of metaphysical incompletion, which does not diminish its beauty or goodness, but is an indication that it participates partially, rather than entirely, in the dimensions of divinity or providence from which it takes its substance.
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Such are the ruins of what civilization has come to, though one might say that civilization is always in ruins, no matter where or when in history you would observe it, not least of all because humankind is a sort of spiritual ruin, or is ‘fallen’ as some would have it, so that our achievements in technology or science or art or medicine, or any other discipline where ‘progress’ is touted as some absolute good (as if, collectively, we could obtain to a state of contentment or satisfaction, and unlock the meaning of existence, or the mystery in which that meaning is shrouded, so long as we press far enough and wide enough our modes of investigation and discovery)…yes, so that all our achievements, however wonderful and useful, amount to little more than outward improvements to our lifestyle, and an increase in our knowledge (though not wisdom) and leisure, which seems most evident, no matter the era, in the disparities between the rich and the poor.
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I should differentiate here between systems that demand my participation, and on which my livelihood depends, and systems that would entice me by making a resource of a weakness in my character. I cannot say that there are many of the former, though I know there is no shortage of the latter. For each day of my waking finds me, and many who, like me, persist in a climate of stability and comfort, though not exorbitant wealth, returning without duress to the products and cultural venues by which nothing of necessity is gained, but much that is toxic, useless, and undignified is offered and is consumed.
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The easy thing to do here is to exonerate the individual while blaming the system in which the individual participates, and such a verdict is justified inasmuch as the system has become so massive and pervasive that the livelihood of the individual is made to depend on his or her participation in it. (This isn’t even to speak of the ways in which some systems will privilege certain groups of people while oppressing or disenfranchising others). But to ignore the fact that the individual has, in many cases, recourse to another mode of existence, one that disengages from a system, and that forgoes the consistent but soulless returns that it offers, for one’s allegiance to it, by staking out a territory where there is no system, or a system that does not exploit human nature, and its proclivity for sin, is to underestimate the sovereignty of the will that belongs to every person.
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There is the system, then, and there is the individual, and the system uses the promise of pleasure (though not always pleasure itself) as a means by which to lure the individual into functioning as a tool for its own profit or increase.
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What, other than the pursuit of pleasure, for instance, are those modes of living that our contemporary world encourages us to participate in? Almost every activity that involves an audience as part of its milieu (though not necessarily as part of its function) has now, in the early twenty-first century, been brought under the influence of social media, which, when monetized, measures the value of a thing by its popularity. Which I suppose is no different a system than that of the advertising industry that preceded it, and that reached its heights during the age of television, except that now the consumer, or the user (or whatever name you would give the individual that is its target), is involved in the work of hysteria and exaggeration and popularization that was once the responsibility of the brand. For with the democratization of technology has come a democratization of our utility as pitch men and women for our own so-called ‘value’, or that of others.
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For what is not so obvious, I think, is the way that the pursuit of pleasure often hides itself in modes of living that a civilization has deemed acceptable, even honorable.
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Which is such an obvious truth that most adults seem to know it. And yet I often will ignore it. And I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of people I’ve met who’ve arranged their lives in such a way that they do not, by their daily habits or regimens, exist in forgetfulness of it.
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For pleasure is of such a fleeting, ephemeral nature that to pursue it, rather than to leave one’s self open to it, and to appreciate it when it arrives, amounts to a misapprehension of reality.
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My problem with hedonism, or decadence, or any mode of existence that could be described as self-serving, is that I could not be convinced, even if I were an atheist, that living for one’s pleasure alone is an actual form of happiness, neither for those around you nor for you yourself. Which, in a paradoxical way, would mean that it is not self-serving at all. Or, anyway, would mean that it is self-defeating.
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In other words, a hedonist who is atheist and a humanist who is atheist share in common their atheism, and the one is no less entitled to that descriptor than the other. What differentiates them, assuming they are both acting in good faith, is the conviction that their own lifestyle is where happiness is to be found.
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For while there are, of course, ethical atheists (Buddhists, for example, or secular humanists, or any such persons who would navigate reality in a way that convention would describe as benevolent), such positions need not be justified ontologically (which, for a religious person, means seeking a cosmic precipitant, or an unmoved mover that exists out-of-time, and who has a will that can be discerned, and that has been revealed), but by determining that, among those lifestyles that do not regard reality as belonging to a supernatural order, the particular one on which they’ve settled offers a happiness that is more sustainable, enduring, and genuine than that of any other.
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Not that one seeks an ethics first, and then an ontology by which to legitimize that ethics, but that, if you are going to tell me that you don’t believe in a deity, or deities, do not then tell me that the ethics by which you attempt to function, and sustain your daily existence, and bring your conscience into harmony with (particularly if that ethics is based on altruism, or what is known as ‘loving-kindness’), is more defensible (except, perhaps, on natural grounds) than those of a person who would describe themselves as utterly without ethics.
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Which would mean that we are not special or remarkable after all, except as an accident of nature, which is an argument to which I have listened, for it isn’t unsound, or without a capacity to convince, and yet it makes a rather flimsy notion of ‘humanism,’ or whatever ethics one might attempt to draw from it, insofar as it would mean that our existence, not having an origin outside of its own materiality, and based only in survival, is absent or bereft of intention (what theists often attribute to the ‘image of the creator’ in us), and thus cannot support categories of ‘right and wrong’, or ‘good and bad,’ without those categories seeming arbitrary or sentimental, and lacking in the very rationale that up till then its proponents will have championed.
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Which isn’t to say that a person who has determined that life has no consequences providentially, or supernaturally (an atheist, for example), cannot also regard the human condition as special, or remarkable, for indeed that person can, but only that the evidence to which they will look for that specialness, or by which they will arrive at that conclusion, confines itself to the premise that the sophistication of our being, delivered to us by the processes of evolution, finds its end in evolution, and is not indicative of anything more than a momentum that is solely and absolutely explicable.
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Which illustrates, I think, what is valuable about existentialism. In that it helps us view the drama that is life through a filter that would remove our moral sense, or our tendency to interpret experience with a sort of moral calculus, so that the phenomena of reality can reach our consciousness raw, without adjustment, and in so doing remind us that, intelligence aside, and evolutionary stature notwithstanding, we are special, as creatures, only inasmuch as there is truth to the belief that providence has ordained certain things of us.
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For it is the self which exists that Beckett means by the “unchanging.” And it is the various ways that we occupy that self, with careers and families and entertainments and addictions and hobbies and pleasantries and gossip and ritual and so forth, that he means by the “forms” that would give “relief from its formlessness.”
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“The forms are many in which the unchanging seeks relief from its formlessness,” observes the narrator of the novel Malone Dies, thus describing our existential lot.