Philosophy
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The Big Picture?

The world, as we know it, can please us but can never satisfy us. And not just because we grow old and die or because tragedy can strike without warning. Growing old and dying, after all, is a relatively small part of life, and for most people tragedies happen seldom. Nor is it because frustration, disappointment and failure are common experiences that loom large in many lives.

No, the main reason why the world can never even begin to satisfy us is because of the inherent limitations of the human condition, specifically the large number of unavoidable briars which fill each and every day. As Rosalind said in ‘As You Like It,’ “Oh, how full of briars is this working day world.”

Click HERE for a list of 50 common briars.

Now briars don’t make us so miserable that we seriously consider ending it all. They’re typically nuisances rather than misfortunes. Nevertheless they’re still very efficient in interfering with our enjoyment of life, and by doing so they cause real dissatisfaction. That being the case, it’s fantasy to imagine that we will stop feeling dissatisfied and become contented beings merely by getting rid of such relatively “trivial” threats as climate change, nuclear war, economic or demographic collapse, this or that brutal dictator, deluded demagogue, corrupt political class or power-hungry elite. However fantasy is something that human beings are addicted to because gratification from fantasy is not imaginary gratification—at least not until reality breaks in.

One of the most popular fantasies is the age-old ambition to reform human nature. No doubt people without human passions, loyalties and appetites could handle the world’s problems with laughable ease. In other words human nature is our chief problem, a view held by Aristotle and probably your grandfather. Moreover when we accept the fact that man is the dissatisfied, hard-to-please, fault-finding animal, it should be obvious that any social or political program to reform him is a fool’s errand, a point that many great and famous minds have made in various ways. For example:

Insanity in individuals is rare—but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it’s the rule.

Nietzsche

Men will always be mad and those who think they can cure them are the maddest of all.

Voltaire

In every country the universal faults and evils of mankind are set down as local peculiarities. Men are miserable by necessity, and determined to believe themselves miserable by accident.

Leopardi

The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of the truth—that error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it has been cured of one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one.

H. L. Mencken

It is folly to expect people to do all that you would reasonably expect them to do.

Archbishop Richard Whately

The troubles of our proud and angry dust
Are from eternity, and shall not fail.

A. E. Housman

Despite all this, most people still want more than what life has to offer—quite a lot more actually. If we take that as axiomatic, is there an intellectually honest way of looking at our situation that will allow us to say, not with certainty but with enough conviction to inspire hope, “Perhaps everything is exactly the way it should be!”

Specifically, perhaps brutal tyrants, corrupt politicians, and selfish elites play an indispensable role in some larger scheme of things. Perhaps our enemies and our oppressors are ultimately there for our benefit. Maybe wars and the bloody chaos of history are necessary props to provide the dramatic element in human life. For the only thing that seems to really satisfy human beings is a story full of good and bad people doing good and bad things; and, to thicken the plot, good people inadvertently doing bad things and bad people inadvertently doing good things. In short, maybe all the things we dislike and deplore and denounce are supposed to be there. Soren Kierkegaard said that a possibility is a hint from God, and if we’re prepared to entertain this particular possibility, then our next step would be to look for rational grounds that would justify such a counter-intuitive outlook on life and the world.

To this end I propose the following line of argument. Feelings, like thoughts, are facts, even though they’re not material facts. Happiness is a feeling, and therefore happiness is a fact. That happiness—I mean pure and unadulterated happiness—only occurs at long (or very long) intervals in most people’s lives doesn’t affect its status as a fact. We can therefore lay to rest once and for all the nagging suspicion that perfect happiness is an illusion, or that the longing for it is just a product of wishful thinking. Perfect happiness undoubtedly exists. But since we live in a world where some mothers are bound to lose their child and some children are bound to lose their mother, we have to accept the fact that Nature can only be counted on to provide the lesser forms of happiness, such as enjoyment, excitement, satisfaction, contentment.

Whether it’s God or Nature that gives us glimpses of real happiness is a matter of opinion. Either way, both experience and reason tell us that enduring full-blooded happiness is not in the cards; at least not on this side of the grave. Thank God (or thank Nature) we still have the lesser kinds of happiness without which life would be unendurable. Indeed for most of us the “lesser” kinds make life much more than endurable. At one end of the spectrum a lucky few can truthfully say, “I’ve had a very interesting life, and I would be very glad to have it all over again.” Those near the other end might feel obliged to side with Thomas Fuller, “No one should be afraid to die who has understood what it is to live.” Between those two extremes we have Churchill’s take on life: “It’s been a grand journey—well-worthing making once.”

So then, as already indicated, anyone who’s not prepared to settle for partial or fleeting happiness needs to find reasons and evidence that suggest definitive enduring happiness might exist on the other side of the grave, presumably outside time in something called eternity. But does evidence exist that is strong enough to persuade us that such a possibility isn’t just a figment of our imagination?

This may be a good place to start: At ten past five on July 8, 1935, André Frossard, the twenty-year-old son of one of the founders of the French communist party, went into a chapel in the Latin Quarter, looking for a friend. He went in there as a sceptic and atheist of the extreme left, and with something more than scepticism, something more than atheism, namely, an indifference and an immersion in so much that had so little to do with God that he no longer even bothered to deny His existence. It seemed to him absolutely one of those things that had long since been relegated to man’s insecurity and ignorance. He came out a few minutes later carried, uplifted, caught and borne forward on a tidal wave of inexhaustible joy.

He’s far from unique. Throughout history many people have had experiences that made them believe with absolute certainty that there exists, in the words of Frossard, “a world of a brilliance and density that reduces ours to the faint shadows of unfinished dreams.” Now nobody likes to dismiss such accounts as outright fabrications. Yes, say the sceptics, these things occur as mental artifacts, something that brains do from time to time. The sticking point for sceptics, of course, is whether they correspond to any objective reality. The sceptic is entitled to dispute the correspondence—not to have that right would be to do away with intellectual freedom—but the sceptic is not justified in denying that these experiences are evidence. All we can say for the moment is that this “evidence” may or may not turn out to be valid evidence.

There’s a concept with the fancy name of ‘Proof-theoretical coherence,’ and we use it unconsciously all the time. It comes into play when we can’t prove some proposition directly, but we can see that if the proposition were true, then it would be consistent with many things that know to be true, or at least take for granted. This method of reasoning falls well short of logical demonstration; rather it relies on non-demonstrative inference. Richard Dawkins provided a nice example of an implied non-demonstrative inference when he wrote: “If he existed and chose to reveal it, God himself could clinch the argument, noisily and unequivocally, in his favour.” Every theist would emphatically agree with that statement, but they wouldn’t agree with his silent non-demonstrative inference, namely that since God doesn’t noisily and unequivocally clinch the question of His existence in His own favour, therefore He doesn’t exist.

Non-demonstrative inferences, such as Dawkins’s, may or may not be valid. In fact the vast majority of our inferences fall into this category, which is to say that they’re not infallible like logical inferences. But that’s not something to be regretted. On the contrary it’s the guarantee of our intellectual freedom. Notwithstanding the assumption of many people, it wouldn’t be a good thing if truth could always be arrived at through logic and everyone was forced to believe the same things or made to feel like self-deluding fools.

Returning to the concept of ‘Proof-theoretical coherence’ we should ask ourselves, “How many things might end up working to our benefit if earthly life were not an end in itself but a means to an end?” For instance, many people believe (and the entertainment industry assumes) that the strongest experiences of happiness occur in connection with romantic love. And it’s often thought that the unity of the lovers is intrinsic to this kind of love. But it may not be so simple. Suppose G. K. Chesterton is right in saying that it’s a mistake to think that love unifies human beings. Love, he says, diversifies people because love is directed towards individuality. Indeed there’s plenty of evidence showing that the thing that really unites people and makes them resemble one another is hatred.

Thus it would seem that the more people resemble one another, the less scope there is for love, especially romantic love. If it wasn’t for individuality, there wouldn’t be much point to falling in love. Why not just love ourselves—which we do anyway. But the experience of falling in love with oneself, even if it were possible, seems unappealing and lacking in interest. Therefore a world which offers the greatest possibilities for diversifying human beings seems ideal for the most vivid and rewarding experiences of love. We live in just such a world, for there is nothing like physical challenges, moral dilemmas, adversity and tragedy to diversify human beings.

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