We will say with confidence that, sometime, there will probably be no extra human beings. That signifies that we’re fooling ourselves if, as Simone Weil claims atheists should do, we search an absolute good in a human future, revolutionary or in any other case. The human species and its creations, finally, are similar to particular person people: finally, this too shall cross.
I don’t need to knock makes an attempt to make progress on this planet. My life, and so many others, are immeasurably higher than have been these a whole bunch of years in the past, within the brief time we now have on this planet. As Peter Berger rightly famous, “remind your self that, in any historic portray depicting a scene previous to the mid-Nineteenth century, 80 % of the individuals within the image are struggling extreme tooth ache.” That progress issues. However we should not lose sight that there is no such thing as a extra ultimacy to that progress than there’s to progressive enchancment inside our personal particular person lives.
That is what Martin Hägglund’s work misses: the “realm of freedom” he envisions can’t be our telos, our final finish. I’ve discovered Hägglund’s work very useful as a result of it envisions a utopia that really appears comparatively utopian to me – and by doing so, exhibits us the bounds of utopia itself. Even when we are able to envision a fabric utopia that we take do be as fascinating as that one appears, and we expect that utopia is feasible, we have to acknowledge that that utopia is just not our final finish; our final finish is a literal finish, human extinction. (That’s not even to say the purpose that even in a fabric utopia we may have tons of different issues to cope with.)
How then ought to we dwell our lives, figuring out that, individually and collectively, they have to finish? It appears to me that this realization helps us shift our consideration from the future to the current, in a myriad of the way – recognizing the necessity to be right here now, to make use of a once-popular phrase. A number of traditions level us to the significance of such a present-orientation. I believe it’s on the coronary heart of George Grant’s Daoism. William Christian’s introduction to Grant’s Time as Historical past says: “Grant discovered [Nietzsche’s] doctrine of everlasting recurrence of the an identical a horny correction to the view of time as historical past: ‘It’s… a doctrine of the trans-historical entire of nature.’” Most conventional cosmologies don’t perceive time as a progress of historical past, however as in some respects cyclical or recurrent, and there’s something about such conventional views that helps us attune ourselves to the current quite than focus obsessively on the long run.
We do not need to take these conventional descriptions as factual to see the knowledge in them. The Cakkavatti Sīhanāda Sutta (“lion’s roar of the wheel-turning king”) tells a cosmological story (which I describe at extra size in Disengaged Buddhism), the place lifespans as soon as have been 80 000 years lengthy and can in the future drop to 10 years, however then begin coming again up. There’s no purpose to consider that story factually. However Steven Collins suspects it by no means was supposed to offer a factual account of historical past, however as an alternative to offer a “sense of the futility of temporal items”. Such a indifferent perspective to time could be useful even as issues worsen within the brief time period, and I believe it could assist us in the long run as nicely.
I don’t need to throw the child of progress out with the bathwater. Thinkers like Grant could be tempted by a small- or capital-T traditionalism, which may lead us to a reactionary place that makes the brief occasions we now have right here worse. Ladies, above all, have been stored down for hundreds or extra years; the previous couple hundred years have abolished slavery, as a follow identified all through the remainder of human historical past. Issues did get higher! Individuals do replicate on their scenario, and transfer it in a course of attempting to make it higher, and that could be a good factor. I simply don’t need to make that motion extra vital than it’s. In the long run, as Ecclesiastes would say, it too is a vainness of vanities. There may be solely a lot that it’s going to repair earlier than human beings are gone and none of it issues anymore.
The place then does this all go away us? Nicely, all of us need to deal one way or the other with the actual fact of our personal particular person deaths. Many people search to do that by means of one thing that can outlast us, whether or not revolutionary social change, an amazing murals, or our descendants. However that strategy doesn’t suffice to cope with the deaths of these issues we now have striven for. We’re higher off taking an strategy to our personal deaths that may additionally deal with the deaths of the species, like these sensible phrases from Epicurus:
loss of life, essentially the most scary of unhealthy issues, is nothing to us; since after we exist, loss of life is just not but current, and when loss of life is current, then we don’t exist. Due to this fact, it’s related neither to the dwelling nor to the lifeless, because it doesn’t have an effect on the previous, and the later don’t exist. (Letter to Menoeceus 125)
After we’re lifeless, we received’t care that we’re lifeless – whether or not the “we” stands for every indivdual or for all the species. The eventual loss of life of the species makes it extra pressing to dwell within the current second quite than in an envisioned future. For Epicurus as for the Daoists, solely the current is our happiness. We have to hand over the hope of “I’ll be comfortable when…” – not solely individually, that I will probably be comfortable after some drawback in my life is mounted, however collectively, that we will probably be comfortable when some main social drawback is mounted. Residing nicely means dwelling nicely now, on this planet we now have. All of this, in flip, is less complicated stated than performed; that’s why I’d been so suspicious of Daoist sudden liberation. Typically you want to spend this current second working exhausting on your self in order that in a future second you’ll have turn out to be in a position to respect it as current. However that’s the aim – or at the least a aim, an important one.
So I believe there are at the least two methods one can fairly reply to Weil’s declare that “to orient oneself towards an absolute good down right here, one should place it sooner or later” – each of which reject the try and be revolutionary. One is to just accept the declare whereas rejecting the thought of an absolute good: one refuses to commerce in absolutes and limits oneself to what Charles Hallisey has known as “quite fragile and native achievement”. The opposite is to reject the declare and certainly discover absolutely the good down right here, in the fantastic thing about every particular person second. Each of those responses appear to me quite Daoist. Both means, we take what we’ve obtained within the current, quite than placing our religion sooner or later.
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