Who Am I and If So How Many? (32 page)

Does this clarify the issue of happiness? Philosophically, perhaps, but psychologically there is still quite a lot to discover. Why do some people seem to have their life routines down pat? Why do some of us always know exactly what to do? And why do most of us manage to muddle through? It’s probably not a matter of some of us understanding happiness better than others, because people who appear to sail through life are not always happier. So is happiness overrated? Are a happy and a successful life perhaps not ultimately the same thing at all? Is there something more important than happiness?

Something is wrong with the world, but don’t bother looking for these words in a history of philosophy, because you won’t find them. They were spoken by Morpheus, a character in the film
The Matrix
, written and directed by two brothers, Andy and Larry Wachowski. The movie was a big box-office and critical success at the turn of the twenty-first century – and rightly so. Rarely has there been such a philosophical film about the nature of existence.

The film tells the story of Neo, a computer hacker who learns from Morpheus that the world in which he and all other people think they live is not the real world; it is a virtual world, created by networked computers. It is the Matrix. After mankind made the planet Earth uninhabitable, computers took over and created the
Matrix, exploiting people as a source of energy by placing them in pods filled with liquid nutrients and deluding them with a simulated reality. Offered the chance to learn the truth by Morpheus, Neo frees himself from the Matrix in a long and difficult struggle. In the end, he evolves into a kind of Christ figure, a redeemer of mankind.

The movie draws on a whole series of models, in particular on two novels,
Star Diaries
and
Golem XIV
, by the Polish
science-fiction
writer Stanislaw Lem. The motif of life in a virtual, nonreal world is also found in Daniel Galouye’s novel
Simulacron Three
, which was made into two movies.
The Matrix
also draws on the philosophy of Jean Baudrillard and incorporates Gnostic motifs. But the copyright for the idea that all existence on earth is merely illusory goes neither to the Wachowski brothers nor to Galouye, Lem, or Baudrillard, but to the Greek philosopher Plato.

In his famous ‘allegory of the cave,’ in book 7 of his
Republic
(ca. 370
BCE
), Plato describes a strange scenario: a group of people have lived in an underground cave since early childhood. Shackled to a wall of rock, these people can move neither their heads nor their bodies; they can only gaze at the cave wall facing them. Their only source of light is a fire burning behind them. Between the fire and their backs, images and objects being carried past them cast shadows on the wall. The prisoners see only the shadows of these objects as well as their own shadows and those of their fellow prisoners. Even when the bearers of the objects speak, it sounds as though the shadows themselves are speaking. Without any knowledge of what is really going on beyond what they can perceive, the cave dwellers regard the shadows as the sole true world. And there is no emerging from this existence. A prisoner who managed to see the light of day would eventually figure out what was going on in the cave, but he would not be able to enlighten the others because his explanations would lie beyond what they could picture, and he would be ridiculed: ‘Would it not be said of him that he had returned from his journey aloft with his eyes ruined?’

Naturally Plato was not scripting a screenplay for a
science-fiction
film or thriller when he wrote this allegory. He simply wanted to show that the philosophical mind needs to detach and free itself from the sensory domain step by step in order to advance to the true nature of things. Plato had far less regard for knowledge gained through the senses than for abstract reasoning. Even so, his allegory of the cave made him the father of all Matrix visions. Let us return to
The Matrix
for a moment. Neo breaks out of his simulated life although he does not appear to be faring at all badly in it. But why? We could actually picture life in the Matrix as a veritable paradise. Let us imagine that as long as people are attached to the Matrix, they can choose whatever kind of life they would like. They can live it up as George Clooney or Scarlett Johansson, shoot fantastic goals as Ronaldinho or Kaká, or spend every night with a dream lover. But in contrast to the situation in the film, they are well aware that these are projections of their own desires and that this world is not real, although it feels perfectly real. Would anybody want to live that way for very long?

At first they might find it exhilarating to play out a second life of their own devising, but would the feeling last? What kind of life would it be to enjoy nonstop success, with everything that guarantees happiness at your fingertips? A terrible life!

Clearly there is something more important than happiness, because a guaranteed happiness would bore us to death. Everything in life attains its value by means of contrast. It is fine to wish for an abundance of happiness, but not for everlasting happiness. In the words of that clever philosopher George Bernard Shaw, ‘A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth!’ But it is not just the specter of monotonous happiness that makes a life in the Matrix so daunting. Worse still is the idea that one cannot make decisions about one’s own life. Self-determination is such an important asset that happiness determined from outside ourselves is not an enticing prospect for most people. People need to craft their happiness through their own efforts; happiness handed to you on a silver platter loses its value. What significance would
winning have if losing were not an option? As Leo Tolstoy insisted, happiness consists not in doing what you want, but in wanting what you do.

I don’t know whether that convinces you, but I think Tolstoy’s comment touches on what people like to call the ‘meaning of life,’ an issue that many philosophers are loath to tackle these days, since they associate it with populist self-help books or fuzzy New Age thinking. The question of the meaning of life, once considered lofty and important, is now considered hokey. More than 2,400 years ago, when the Greeks laid the foundations for what we now call Western philosophy, they tried to address this very question – although there is no direct ancient Greek counterpart to the phrase ‘meaning of life.’ But the question – What truly matters? – was essentially the same.

In this book, we have encountered many philosophers who tackled this question, directly or indirectly. Let us shine the spotlight on our philosophers one last time as they take their final bows.

Prior to the modern era, philosophers did not engage with the question of the meaning of the world, believing that this was not an issue for man, since God had already provided the answer. People in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Baroque era thus had no need to delve into it. The Church told them what God’s ideas and objectives for man were, and that was that. But the turning point that shifted our consciousness into the center of the world in lieu of the world order laid down by God led directly to the question of the meaning of life, to which serious attention was devoted beginning in the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries.

For Immanuel Kant, the purpose of life was to fulfill one’s moral obligation, which is, as we have seen, a rather dreary aim. For Jean-Jacques Rousseau, it was to live according to one’s own nature and never do what goes against the grain. For Jeremy Bentham, it meant ensuring the greatest possible pleasure for oneself and others. William Paley saw the meaning of human life in generating the greatest number of ‘useful works.’

The question experienced a real boom in the mid-nineteenth century. The philosophical heirs of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel were somewhat at a loss when contemplating the monumental works of their forebears. Philosophy had been a shining beacon and had declared itself the crown jewel of the arts and sciences, able to shed light on all of life’s questions, yet it was unable to designate the ingredients of a successful life. Its gigantic structures of thought were built on a very narrow foundation of practical insight.

Arthur Schopenhauer, Søren Kierkegaard, Ludwig Feuerbach, and, indirectly, Karl Marx all sought to provide a new answer to the question. Schopenhauer adamantly denied that we exist ‘in order to be happy.’ Since man is the slave of his will, he argued, little latitude remains for a free and higher meaning. Only the arts – in particular, music – offer man a higher pleasure. Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud also built on this idea. For them, the very question of the meaning of life was an expression of physical or mental weakness. A healthy person does not need a higher meaning in life; happiness comes from music (Nietzsche) or love and work (Freud). For Ernst Mach, the question of the meaning of life dissolved along with the ‘ego.’ If the butterfly no longer has the same ego as the caterpillar, and a child’s differs from a man’s, there is no need to impose a universal meaning on all of life. The sense of what truly matters – which Mach called the ‘economy of thought’ – steers clear of the ‘meaning of life.’

The major figures of twentieth-century philosophy made a point of rejecting clear-cut answers and not engaging with that issue. A telling example is Ludwig Wittgenstein. For him, the question of the meaning of life was one of those ‘nonsensical questions,’ by its very nature incapable of being answered. ‘The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem. (Is not this the reason why those who have found after a long period of doubt that the sense of life became clear to them have then been unable to say what constituted this sense?)’ For Sartre, by contrast, life takes on meaning when I realize myself through action. Since the world as a whole has no meaning, I am
free to supply my own, which remains a work in progress that comes and goes along with the individual. For Peter Singer, Sartre’s approach lacks a social dimension. His book
How Are We
to Live
? discusses the merits and demerits of pushing the Sisyphean stone up the hill in the quest to ‘make the world a better place.’

There are also explanations of the meaning of life based in evolutionary biology, but they are best left out of the discussion. For the biophilosopher Daniel Dennett, the two evolutionary principles of adaptation and mutation also apply to all questions of human culture: what makes sense for nature makes sense for humans. For a sociologist like Niklas Luhmann, that is nonsense, because ‘meaning’ originates in communication and constitutes a sophisticated evolutionary achievement specific to man. Symbolic communication by means of language cannot be derived from genes’ striving for ‘fitness’ throughout the ages. If man were just nature, it would be inconceivable for people to employ technology that destroys the foundations of their own lives, as this destruction clearly contradicts the biological theory of adaptation as a universal principle of life.

Neuroscience is no better equipped to answer the question of the meaning of life. ‘Meaning’ is neither a scientific unit of measurement nor an object nor an electrophysiological process. Meaning is invisible to itself; a scale has no idea what it weighs.

The only way to address the question of the meaning of life today is subjectively, to ask what meaning I see in
my
life. The reason is simple: meaning is not a characteristic of the world or of nature, but a quintessentially human construction. ‘Meaning’ is a need and an idea cooked up in our vertebrate brains. The point is not to find meaning in the world; instead, we have to
furnish
meaning to ourselves. The question of meaning is thus a human question. Even questions of objective meaning in nature invariably adhere to human ideas, which are dependent upon our
consciousness
, that is, human logic and human language.

Possibly the primary reason underlying our need for meaning is the knowledge that we have to die someday. The brain does not
enjoy contemplating day by day, hour by hour, and second by second the certainty that it is approaching its extinction. Some paleoanthropologists use this awareness to draw the line between animals and people.

The question of meaning in life is thus shaped by uniquely human concerns. And, like all human knowledge, it is an outgrowth of our personal experiences, which is why the best we can hope for is to find our
own
meaning in life. But why are we so bent on exploring
the
meaning of life? And why should life have this
one
meaning? The need to zero in on a single meaning is very human. We seem to devote far more thought to the question of the meaning of life than to why and by what criteria we are actually seeking it. In other words, we examine everything except the quest itself. Writers have enjoyed poking fun at this. ‘If there’s no meaning in it, that saves a world of trouble, as we needn’t try to find any,’ the King of Hearts says in Lewis Carroll’s
Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland
. And the worldly-wise British aphorist Ashleigh Brilliant went one step further when he wrote: ‘Life may have no meaning. Or even worse, it may have a meaning of which I disapprove.’

The idea that life has a particular meaning might not be so appealing after all. Typically, the quest to find meaning in life evolves as we age. In our younger years, we search for an objective meaning and a goal in life, but later in life, we start to wonder: did
my
life have meaning? In other words: did I live it well? The question of meaning loses a great deal of its epistemic aspect, and philosophical reflection yields to psychological stock-taking and self-justification. Here it is less a question of ‘meaning’ than of fulfillment: have I made something of my life that has given me lasting pleasure?

Many biologists would surely agree that the goal of life is to live it. That is how nature obviously thought of it – assuming nature is capable of thought. But of all the characteristics that can be found in proteins and amino acids, meaning is not one of them. Quite possibly the most elegant scientific response is offered in the novel
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
by the British science-fiction writer Douglas Adams. Aliens invent a supercomputer, Deep Thought, for the sole purpose of answering ‘the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.’ Deep Thought takes a full seven and a half million years to calculate the result, then announces that they will not like it. After a bit of stalling, the computer spits out the Ultimate Answer: ‘Forty-two!’ The aliens are taken aback by this seemingly senseless statistic, but Deep Thought, sounding every bit like Wittgenstein, defends this numerical answer by declaring that the question it was fed made no sense. Anyone who would pose such an imprecise question, the computer declares, is not in a position to make head or tail of the answer. To mollify them, Deep Thought offers to design and build an even bigger computer to formulate a proper question. The computer – which Deep Thought dubs ‘Earth’ – is built, and it begins to search for the question. But Earth never gets past the quest for the Question to the Ultimate Answer. Just before the program runs out, Earth is demolished – to clear the way for a hyperspace bypass.