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Death, futility, and the proleptic power of narrative ending

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 June 2010

JOSHUA SEACHRIS
JOSHUA SEACHRIS*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of Oklahoma, 455 W. Lindsey, Room 605, Norman, OK73019-2006
*
e-mail: jseachris@ou.edu
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Abstract

Death and futility are among a cluster of themes that closely track discussions of life's meaning. Moreover, futility is thought to supervene on naturalistic meta-narratives because of how they will end. While the nature of naturalistic meta-narrative endings is part of the explanation for concluding that such meta-narratives are cosmically or deeply futile, this explanation is truncated. I argue that the reason the nature of the ending is thought to be normatively important is first anchored in the fact that narrative ending qua ending is thought to be normatively important. Indeed, I think futility is often thought to characterize naturalistic meta-narratives because a narrative's ending has significant proleptic power to elicit a wide range of broadly normative human responses on, possibly, emotional, aesthetic, and moral levels towards the narrative as a whole.

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 47 , Issue 2 , June 2011 , pp. 141 - 163
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

Notes

1. Others include origins, purpose, value, pain and suffering, and how life is going to end.

2. I contrast cosmic futility with local futility. The latter is futility that supervenes upon a localized state of affairs, for example, a four-year-old's aim to climb Mt Everest in a day. The entirety of existence being cosmically futile is consistent with localized aims being worthwhile and attainable.

3. SPI is nicely captured in the slogan, ‘Diamonds are forever’.

4. I am, of course, not referring to logical impossibility, but metaphysical impossibility. Though, it must be admitted that, strictly speaking, one can imagine scenarios where post-mortem survival is even metaphysically possible within an exclusively naturalist ontology, for example, through successive transfers of consciousness into different material bodies, as an anonymous reviewer for this journal reminded me. Nonetheless, post-mortem survival fits much more naturally within a theistic ontology, and attempts to secure it on naturalism are tenuous at best.

5. SI is explicitly affirmed by Victor Frankl: ‘[D]eath itself is what makes life meaningful’; idem The Doctor and the Soul (New York NY: Alfred Knopf, 1957), 73. Also by Karl Popper: ‘There are those who think that life is valueless because it comes to an end. They fail to see that the opposite argument might also be proposed: that if there were no end to life, life would have no value; that it is, in part, the ever-present danger of losing it which helps bring home to us the value of life’; idem ‘How I see philosophy’, in A. Mercier and M. Svilar (eds) Philosophers on Their Own Work (Berne & Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1977), 148.

6. This is the position of Brooke Allen Trisel in ‘Human extinction and the value of our efforts’, The Philosophical Forum, 35 (2004), 371–391CrossRefGoogle Scholar, along with most contemporary naturalists. Interestingly, there are those who think that not only is post-mortem existence, extending endlessly into the future, not necessary for a worthwhile, meaningful life, but that such a state would actually threaten such a life. For example, see Bernard Williams's existential – as opposed to logical or metaphysical – objection to traditional accounts of post-mortem survival in his, ‘The Makropulos Case: reflections on the tedium of immortality’, in idem Problems of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 82–100. Importantly, (ii) additionally highlights the difference between optimistic and pessimistic naturalists. Pessimistic naturalists, along with most theists, claim that God's existence and post-mortem survival are necessary conditions for a meaningful and worthwhile life. Unlike theists, pessimistic naturalists deny that God exists, and so conclude that life is meaningless and futile. Schopenhauer, Camus, and possibly Bertrand Russell fall into this category. Optimistic naturalists, however, deny that God and post-mortem survival are necessary for a meaningful, worthwhile life. Thus, they would deny a strong version of SPI applied to human life. Most contemporary philosophical naturalists would recognize themselves as optimistic, in the sense the term is used in this context.

7. From here on, I will use the term ‘meta-narrative’ and not ‘narrative’ to describe entire metaphysical systems like naturalism and Christian theism. Interestingly, the meta-narratives of some metaphysical systems, like Christian theism for example, will possess a narrative in the paradigmatic sense of the term ‘narrative’, largely in virtue of such religious traditions' connection with religious texts which themselves contain an overarching redemptive story of the cosmos. In contrast, the meta-narratives of other metaphysical systems, like naturalism for example, will be narratives only in some loose and non-paradigmatic sense. For a discussion of the classification of narrative and non-narrative discourse, see Marie-Laure Ryan ‘Toward a definition of narrative’, in David Herman (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 22–35. Meta-narratives, or ‘grand narratives’ as they have been called, are ‘second-order narratives which seek to narratively articulate and legitimate some concrete first-order practices or narratives’; J. M. Bernstein ‘Grand narratives’, in David Wood (ed.) On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and Interpretation (London: Routledge, 1991), 102. New Testament Scholar, N. T. Wright, adds that such narratives are ‘normative: that is, they claim to make sense of the whole of reality’; Wright The New Testament and the People of God, I, Christian Origins and the Question of God (Minneapolis MN: Fortress Press, 1992), 41. I will not defend the concept of meta-narrative against various postmodern criticisms, though I do not share postmodernity's ‘incredulity toward meta-narratives’; Jean-François Lyotard The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Geoff Bennington & Brian Massumi (trans.) (Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), xxiv.

8. The judgment might also be based upon other considerations, like whether or not one thinks objective value can be secured in an exclusively naturalistic ontology. The debate over the ontology of value, even within the naturalist camp, reveals that there is not just one naturalistic meta-narrative, even though there will be some continuity across all naturalistic meta-narratives in virtue of shared theses about the nature of reality.

9. Regardless of whether or not the endings of narratives should possess such influence over our broadly normative assessments of narratives as a whole (or whether or not narrative theorists and philosophers have given this literary-anthropological phenomenon enough attention), they in fact do.

10. See my paper ‘The meaning of life as narrative: a new proposal for interpreting philosophy's “primary” question’, Philo, 20 (2009), 5–23Google Scholar.

11. Hepburn, R. W. ‘Questions about the meaning of life’, in Klemke, E. D. (ed.) The Meaning of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 262Google Scholar. Thaddeus Metz has done much helpful work on this and related issues. See his ‘New developments in the meaning of life’, Philosophy Compass, 2 (2007), 196–217CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem ‘Recent work on the meaning of life’, Ethics, 112 (2002), 781–814CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem ‘The concept of a meaningful life’, American Philosophical Quarterly, 38 (2001), 137–153Google Scholar; and idem ‘Critical notice: Baier and Cottingham on the meaning of life’, Disputatio, 19 (2005), 251–264Google Scholar.

12. I owe the analytic/synthetic distinction introduced in this context to the helpful suggestion of an anonymous referee for the journal.

13. A similar claim can be made for any meta-narrative. That is, meta-narrative x's ending has significant proleptic power to elicit a wide range of broadly normative human responses on, possibly, emotional, aesthetic, and moral levels towards that meta-narrative as a whole. The content of the broadly normative responses will then be dependent upon how meta-narrative x ends.

14. For example, with respect to defining narrative ending, it has been proposed that a narrative's ending is largely constituted by ‘scratching’ or resolving an emotional ‘itch’ initially instantiated by the narrative's beginning and variously perpetuated throughout the narrative. See Velleman, J. David ‘Narrative explanation’, The Philosophical Review, 112 (2003), 18–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This ‘scratching’ is organizational and unifying, for example, like the ‘tock’ of a clock; the tock, of the clock's tick-tock, is the fictionalized ending we bestow on the sequence, thus conferring upon the space between tick and tock ‘duration and meaning’. In this way, the interval between tick and tock becomes something more than the interval between tock and tick; it is transformed from mere successive chronos to pregnant kairos. See Kermode, FrankThe Sense of an Ending (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 44–46Google Scholar.

15. Though, theistic endings will have to contend with, among other criticisms, that of Bernard Williams mentioned in n. 6.

16. Velleman ‘Narrative explanation’, 19.

17. Of course, in the real world we are usually not privy to such information, but that is irrelevant to the thought-experiment.

18. It seems unreasonable to place a condition upon any instance of putative happiness that in order for it to actually be an instance of happiness it must satisfy some strong requirement whereby it has to be permanently stable and indefectible happiness forever.

19. Moster, Christiaan ‘Theodicy and eschatology’, in Barber, Bruce and Neville, David (eds) Theodicy and Eschatology (Adelaide: ATF Press, 2005), 106Google Scholar.

20. Abbott, H. PorterThe Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 53Google Scholar. Whether the desire for such closure in terms of the redemptive-eschatological vision of, say, Christian theism is mere wishful thinking or more akin to a natural desire is an interesting question, but one that I will not discuss in the present context.

21. I say ‘non-narrative explanations’ because narrative can be thought of as a species of explanation. For a defence of this, see Velleman ‘Narrative explanation’.

22. Fischer, John Martin ‘Free will, death, and immortality: the role of narrative’, Philosophical Papers, 34 (2005), 379–403CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23. Of course, one could plausibly argue that closure is present in works of horror in the sense of a settled stance, but that the settled stance itself is one of shuddering or despair.

24. Velleman ‘Narrative explanation’, 18–22.

25. Of course, an advocate of a meta-narrative that posits eternal life may argue that there is no longer any need of closure for the post-consummation portion of the meta-narrative, precisely because the problem set has been remedied. There may be other dilemmas for the immortal life, but perhaps this is not one of them.

26. This popular refrain occurs at least twenty-nine times in the book of Ecclesiastes. My use of the phrase is exegetically plausible, though scholars of Ecclesiastes debate its precise meaning. Unless otherwise noted, all scriptural citations will be from the English Standard Version of the Bible (Wheaton IL: Crossway Bibles, 2001).

27. Dworkin, RonaldSovereign Virtue (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 246Google Scholar.

28. According to the model of challenge, a good life has the inherent value of an Aristotelian skillful performance, and thus, in contrast with the model of impact, events, achievements, and experiences can have value though they may have no impact beyond the life in which they occur; Ibid., 253. Death cannot nullify their value, significance, and meaningfulness, because such constructs are not functions of impact or continuation or consequence, but rather of the skilfulness of the performance(s) itself. Furthermore, the model of challenge circumvents the objection that nothing humans do in the face of the vast, unconcerned universe matters because it does not anchor value in anything other than life and the activities of life performed well.

29. Dworkin Sovereign Virtue, 251.

30. Cf. n. 4.

31. Nozick, RobertPhilosophical Explanations (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 594–600Google Scholar.

32. Here, impossible may refer to either logical impossibility (e.g. me writing and not-writing at the same time and in the same sense) or metaphysical impossibility (e.g. me bicycling to the North Pole in 4 minutes and 45 seconds). Everything that is logically impossible is metaphysically impossible, but not everything that is metaphysically impossible is logically impossible.

33. There have been numerous alterations made to the Sisyphus story in order to test philosophical intuitions about what constitutes a futile state of affairs, and if such conclusions themselves are functions of whether one thinks valuable, worthwhile, and meaningful states of affairs should be construed as such, either subjectively or objectively. For an example of such alterations and subsequent discussion, see Richard Taylor Good and Evil: A New Direction (London: Macmillan, 1970), 256–268.

34. Futility, then, can be a noun, picking out some state of affairs, or it can be more of an adjective, characterizing the effort put into trying to accomplish an impossible end – e.g. a futile aim.

35. Whether or not effort directed at some end is futile is context relative. It will include conditions tied to external circumstances as well as conditions tied to the agent himself. For example, it may not be futile for me to research, write, and submit this paper for publication in eight months, but it would be futile for my 22-month old son, William, to do so.

36. I distinguish between perceived and genuine futility because one could be wrong about (i) whether or not some goal is attainable/unattainable, or, more subtly and relevantly in this context, (ii) whether some goal or end state of affairs needs to obtain in order to avoid futility (e.g. post-mortem survival extending endlessly into the future).

37. See, for example, possibly Qohelet (especially in Ecclesiastes 1, though debate exists about how best to interpret Qohelet's pessimistic musings in the book); Arthur Schopenhauer ‘On the vanity of existence’, in Essays and Aphorisms (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 51–54, and Leo Tolstoy ‘A confession’, in Spiritual Writings (Maryknoll NY: Orbis Books, 2006), 46–59.

38. See, for example, Trisel ‘Human extinction and the value of our efforts’. This paper develops a line of argument that casts suspicion on the intuition that nothing is now valuable or worthwhile if extinction is the final word of the universe, by highlighting a competing intuition in the following thought-experiment. Consider the case where (i) your son is on the railway track about ready to be struck by an oncoming train, and (ii) you just learn that the universe will come to an end in three days. With this knowledge of the universe's imminent demise, would you still find rescuing your son to be a valuable aim (and not simply emotionally required)? Most think the answer is yes.

39. C. S. Lewis ‘De futilitate’, in idem Christian Reflections (Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans, 1995), 59.

40. Thomas Nagel ‘The absurd’, in Klemke The Meaning of Life, 176–185.

41. Though, in light of this absurdity, Nagel concludes that we should approach life with a sense of irony as opposed to either tragic heroism (possibly Bertrand Russell) or pessimistic despair (Camus). For Nagel, conclusions of cosmic futility are built upon an illicit assumption – that some future state of affairs detached from the first-person human perspective (because humans are no longer around) actually matters for states of affairs involving the first-person human perspective.

42. This phrase is a bit misleading for there will literally be no-one to take up this point of reference.

43. Again, there are those who argue that this most remote and distant perspective, itself, does not matter and is not relevant to appraisals of the worth, value, and meaningfulness of what goes on now in the lives of human beings. The only perspective relevant, some argue, for appraisals of the worth, value, and meaningfulness of human pursuits, projects, and relationships is the human perspective, and the perspective from the end may not be a perspective at all, given that taking a perspective entails the presence of intentionally directed consciousness. Of course, one might argue that it is relevant that we can take a perspective now about a state of affairs when we will no longer be able to take a perspective at all.

44. As noted in the introduction, leaving such a mark is usually articulated in a sense requiring a doctrine of post-mortem survival that itself requires the survival of the person.

45. William Lane Craig ‘The absurdity of life without God’, in Klemke The Meaning of Life, 42.

46. This, of course, makes post-mortem survival extending endlessly into the future only a necessary condition for a worthwhile, meaningful existence. Christian theists do not affirm this to be a sufficient condition. A robustly construed meaningful existence is built upon numerous doctrines that are woven into the Christian theistic meta-narrative, just one of which is post-mortem survival.

47. Trisel ‘Human extinction and the value of our efforts’, 384.

48. Wielenberg, Erik J.Value and Virtue in a Godless Universe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 16–31Google Scholar.

49. For example, see Paul Edwards, who refers to this as a ‘curious and totally arbitrary preference of the future to the present’; Edwards ‘The meaning of life’ in Klemke The Meaning of Life, 140.

50. Nagel, ThomasMortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 11Google Scholar.

51. There is obviously significant overlap between the philosophic and eschatological dimensions of the problem of evil.

52. In fact, I think arguments from evil receive significant motivating force, a force contributing to their perceived strength as putative instances of atheology, from the problem of evil's palpable emotional component. Compare such arguments to other atheistic arguments, for example, arguments based upon perceived incoherence among theistic divine attributes. Of course, rationally, one may think such arguments are strong; however, they have not occupied the significant place that the problem of evil has in philosophy of religion. One interpretation of this historical reality is that the problem of evil, rationally, is the best atheological argument. Perhaps that is the case, but I suspect that there is more to the story; that the emotional dimension to the problem of evil is a salient component of the problem of evil's perceived philosophical merit, a component not shared by other atheological arguments.

53. Ancient mirrors in the Graeco-Roman world were made from polished metal; thus one's reflection was considerably more ‘dim’ than with modern mirrors.

54. Bertrand Russell ‘A free man's worship’, in idem Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957), 107.

55. I would like to thank Linda Zagzebski and an anonymous referee for this journal for their many helpful suggestions and criticisms of the paper.