How good it is to be alive! [exclaimed the philosopher]

[matt cardin]

Just thought I'd share this here for its provocation value in such an environment. The entire interview is well worth reading, and it shows the philosopher in question demonstrating himself to be anything but a shallow and unreflective optimist who bluntly discounts things such as violence and suffering. I'd love to hear him in conversation with the likes of David Benatar et al.

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THE BELIEVER MAG: More than once, you comment that the self is grounded in the exclamation “How good it is to be alive!” You’ve also written that our bodies are “embedded in the axes of the world,” and in your descriptions of the human condition you integrate biological, psychological, spiritual, and cultural phenomena, without imposing any hierarchy. Who is the “I” that declares the goodness of life, and to what extent does this “I” have power over the world? ALPHONSO LINGIS: There is a goodness and exultation in the inner sense of life, the sense of excess energies surging. And the sight of flourishing fields and forests, of newborn lambs and birds, joins the happiness in us. The strong sense of being “I” arises in commitment. “I will work and get the grades I need to get into medical school.” “I will meet you at the airport.” “I am your brother and I will take care of you.” Here “I” arises as a force and an exhilaration that leaps ahead to fix the future, leaps over the stretch of contingencies and obstacles that may lie ahead. The plight of being unable to foresee and fix one’s future generates a sense of being anyone or no one. Oppression and incarceration aim to produce this. Illness can bring this about. The sense of the goodness of life is lost in depression and the temptation to suicide. From "An Interview with Alphonso Lingis," December 1, 2020

[gveranon]

I'd guess that Benatar would respect Lingis as a worthy philosophical opponent, but I think they are working from different premises, so neither would be swayed by the other.

As I understand Lingis's philosophy, from a partial reading of his book The Imperative and from the pages Graham Harman has written about Lingis, it starts from an "ontological imperative" that is an expansion of Kant's categorical imperative--an expansion of Kant's basic ethical principle into all the domains in which humans encounter the world and each other phenomenologically. We aren't free to do as we please; instead, there are imperatives that arise from the givens of each type of encounter with the world (including other humans). If we try to buck these imperatives, only futility and despair can result. By the way, I think "ontological imperative" is Harman's descriptive term for Lingis's philosophy.

I don't think Benatar would feel compelled to accept this ethical imperative. Instead, he would insist on ethically focusing on the harms vs. benefits of life and then evaluating life as a whole based on this ethical consideration.

So, a philosophical stalemate.

I first became aware of Lingis through my reading of Harman. Harman is a major philosopher for me, and he has had a transformative impact on my own thinking in various areas. So the fact that Harman was influenced by Lingis (who was Harman's advisor for his master's degree) predisposes me to take Lingis more seriously than I otherwise might. (One reason I might not have taken Lingis seriously is that I've always regarded Kant's categorical imperative as fantastical and wrongheaded.) For those who are interested, Harman writes about Lingis's philosophy at length in his book Guerrilla Metaphysics.

Lingis doesn't glide past or sugarcoat any of the hardest facts of life and death. See, for instance, his chapter "The Summons of Death" in The Imperative. As you might expect, he holds that one should accept death with courage and dignity. He gives no sign that he would support euthanasia, but I also doubt that he would respect Dylan Thomas's "Rage, rage against the dying of the light" or the current demand of some for indefinite prolongment of mindless near-corpses by medical equipment.

I haven't read much of Lingis, and I hope I'm not misrepresenting anything in the comments above.

[cannibal cop]

A long time ago I saw a segment on a local news program calling for increased support of our foster care system. The segment was mainly focused on individual community members who had opted to take into their homes and provide full-time care for severely developmentally and/or physically disabled adults and young adults with no other means of support, those who either had no family of their own or had essentially been rejected by the family and left to the care of the state.

What struck me hardest about this segment was the brief glimpse it offered into the life of one such foster carer, an elderly woman living apparently by herself who had taken on the care of a disabled young man abandoned by his parents at birth. I say “young” man but have no idea how young he really was. He was so cruelly and so thoroughly physically deformed that there was no way of guessing his age; he could have been anywhere from ten years old to fifty. He seemed unable to communicate except via rudimentary, painful-sounding grunts and whines. The woman owned a viola or violin that he seemed to take some pleasure in “playing”—dragging the bow across the strings to produce an excruciating tuneless screeching that must have been painful to endure throughout the day. When she took the violin away from him, he began whimpering terribly, a sound far more painful to hear than those he made with the instrument.

The woman confessed to her interviewer that it was all getting too difficult for her. I thought at the time that I could make out a degree of pain in her eyes that wasn’t coming through in her words. In any case, if there’s anybody whose opinions on “How good is it to be alive” I would place any value on at all, it would be those two people.

[xylokopos]

Thanks for providing the link to the full interview, Matt.

What jumps out at me is that he has traveled extensively to places not on the tourist radar and during times of great strife. It is not surprising that he's not the pessimist sort - extreme pessimism does not survive extensive traveling. That has also been my experience. Traveling has helped me temper my gloomier tendencies.

Of course that is not an argument, but testimonies of affinity have their place too.

It is somewhat refreshing to see a view of the cognitive subject as embedded in time, but not in past or present time, not as a nexus of memory and need, but as anticipating future trajectories. I knew that reference to Heidegger was forthcoming when Lingis started expounding on openness and grounding and inhabiting the world. I suppose that on an intellectual level that might appeal to those that contextualize the "I" culturally, geographically, and historically and might seem like bad philosophy to those that disregard this focus on subjectivity and its emplacement.

However, I cannot say that I am much moved by newborn lambs and abundant fields and witnessing life surging forth without rhyme or reason can also lead one to conclude along with Werner Herzog that it is all a jungle characterized by relentless, collective murder.

[Unwary Traveller]

I wrote out these next three posts (split up for length) on Friday as a response to reading the linked interview, but didn’t have time to post them until now. I was in a rather silly mood at the time - it may read as though I am poking fun but I was also trying to engage with the “off-piste” non-academic style of philosophy described in the article.

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“More narrating than arguing his philosophical ideas, he avoids the trappings of academic writing”

Ah, so he avoids doing any actual philosophy, with its unfortunate trappings of rational arguments that argue from a set of premises to reach a conclusion. This is a cunning strategy. The undergraduate avoids philosophy with the rudimentary tactic of staying in bed and skipping the 9am lecture. The Professor Emeritus takes the more audacious approach of ditching philosophy entirely and replacing it with a sophisticated, rambling version of “What I did on my holidays.”

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In the 1980s he departed from conventional academic labor and began publishing a series of books that developed the themes of Levinas and Merleau-Ponty through winding, memoiristic reflections. Throughout his life, he has been a prolific and adventurous traveler, and many of his books take place in transit, following him on his journeys through Asia, Africa, and South and Central America, allowing him to explore his questions in concrete terms, away from the armchair.

I would hope that as the philosophy of ethics matures, the need to write anything at all could be supplanted by a slideshow of seemingly banal holiday pictures, whose deep philosophical meaning would be entirely dependent on the “judgment of anyone endowed with insight.”

In considering the drawbacks of this non-academic approach, I am reminded of a university essay I had to write titled “Why should I be moral?” which came back with a red line halfway down the first page and an arrow pointing to the rest of the essay below. Next to the arrow was a single word - irrelevant. If your system of ethics claims to be objective without a real philosophical basis, then it’s just a statement about how you would like people to behave.

I still have the book that served as our introduction to ethics – Inventing Right and Wrong by J.L. Mackie. Part 1 is titled “The Status of Ethics” and begins with the opening statement “There are no objective values.” It’s a comprehensive one-sentence approach to ethics which has the benefit that you can put the book down and make everything else up to please yourself, as the title suggests. I’m not even joking.

The question posed by “Why should I be moral?” always puts a picture in my mind of an incident I heard about during, I believe, the Los Angeles riots. I remember (possibly mis-remember) a fragment of a news story in which a man was dragged from the cab of a truck and brutally attacked with a fire extinguisher. The senselessness of the assault, combined with the absurdity of the weapon used, made it unforgettable. I’ve always had the unsettling suspicion that there is no purely rational philosophical argument that this scene is wrong in an objective sense. If you are entirely reliant on philosophical argument from first principles, there is nothing you can say to the rational psychopath wielding the extinguisher that will cause him to stop, if he prioritises violence. He has no reason to accept the premises of your ethical arguments. He does not care about the pain of others. He does not care about anything.

But why are you here in the middle of a riot, arguing about philosophy? Ah, you are on your extensive travels, which put you into an exalted state which “reveals a deeper reality than the one we find at home.” You are here to observe “the beauty that attends to violence and the way violence reveals human fragility.” In that case, would you mind holding this VCR so I can get a better swing with the fire extinguisher? And since you are here, maybe you can answer a couple of questions that occurred to me while I was rioting: How does the space of the traveler stand with respect to that of the autochthonous home or homogenous mathematical space? How, if possible, can the reality found in travel inform our manners of dwelling?
*
Real philosophy is about sitting in a chair while simultaneously arguing that the chair is not real. Real philosophy is a gruelling schedule of 12 hours of lectures per week, of which you manage to attend 6 in a good week. Real philosophy is arguing with your professor who says that if a wheel with alternate blue and yellow segments is spinning fast enough it would actually be green, and you say “what if it was a children’s ride and you were sat in the middle as it was spinning around?” Real philosophy is about standing alone in the kitchen and coming out with random phrases like “the concept horse is not a concept” years after you have entirely forgotten their original context.

Don’t trust these charlatans with their “transference of wisdom” and their “excess energies surging.” They will argue that “our bodies are embedded in the axes of the world,” but when you turn around, they will embed an axe in your body, as part of the research for a book on the human impulse to violence. The last thing you hear will be a quote by Andre Breton, and the only consolation will be that at least, in the end, the murder weapon wasn’t a fire extinguisher, as you always feared it would be.

[Unwary Traveller]

Having tried it myself in the post above, I do agree that the refusal of an academic style has its merits. You can say anything you want without the limitations of making sense.

To be serious though, I do think that pure rationality is probably the wrong place to start with ethics in the real world. The idea of man as a “rational animal” only applies to a limited extent, and there is reason to think that pure rationality would not be a successful evolutionary adaptation. Why struggle through the winter in your freezing cave? There is no reason to continue, only some “exultation in the inner sense of life” that keeps you going. The desire for pleasure and the avoidance of pain are the motivations that keep you toiling inside the prison of your body, and it is too late to invoke the argument that you would have better avoided all pain by not being here at all. You are already here. It’s like the old joke of asking a local for directions and they respond “Well, I wouldn’t start from here.”

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I encounter appeal and demand not only in humans but also in seabirds trapped in oil, starving deer, sewage-choked rivers. To perceive need is at the same time to sense what powers and resources I have to supply what they need. What is needed becomes what I have to do when the need is urgent and I am the one who is there and who has the resources (pulling a child out of oncoming traffic, stomping on a smoldering cigarette butt in the forest)…

As an ethical argument from first principles, this kind of thing just doesn’t hold water, but it does make the point that in real personal interactions you are not starting from a blank state; there are various levels of genetic, psychological and social factors that condition how you respond to any situation. A purely rational AI embedded inside a robot may be impossible to persuade to cross the room to give water to a person dying of thirst, but real people are not (usually) fire-extinguisher wielding rational psychopaths who ruthlessly pursue violence at the expense of all else. In a fundamental sense, I do not think that people are even primarily rational beings. Their means may be rational, but the same cannot be said of their ends, which are beyond rationality and are ultimately a biproduct of evolutionary forces.

The comment by Alphoso Lingis that “It does not seem to me that attempts to explain violence in humans by evolutionary psychology have yet been fruitful” seems a little optimistic. Even through aimless casual web-browsing I found a BBC article last week titled Did Neanderthals go to war with our ancestors?

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Predatory land mammals are territorial, especially pack-hunters. Like lions, wolves and our own species Homo sapiens, Neanderthals were cooperative big-game hunters. Other predators, sitting atop the food chain, have few predators of their own, so overpopulation drives conflict over hunting grounds. Neanderthals faced the same problem – if other species didn’t control their numbers, conflict would have.

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This territoriality has deep roots in humans. Territorial conflicts are also intense in our closest relatives, chimpanzees. Male chimps routinely gang up to attack and kill males from rival bands, a behaviour strikingly like human warfare. This implies that cooperative aggression evolved in a common ancestor of chimps and ourselves, at least seven million years ago. If so, Neanderthals will have inherited these same tendencies towards cooperative aggression…

It doesn’t seem unreasonable to reach the conclusion that humans can have tendencies toward both co-operation and aggression in different contexts such as resource scarcity and relationships within and between families, tribes, communities, religions, countries. Lingis doesn’t seem to be a blind optimist though. His quotation from anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros is not exactly very cheery:

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I am convinced that in the somber decades to come, the end of the world ‘as we know it’ is a distinct possibility. And when this time comes (it has already come, in my opinion) we will have a lot to learn from people whose world has already ended a long time ago—think of the Amerindians, whose world ended five centuries ago, their population having dropped to something like 5% of the pre-Columbian one in 150 years, the Amerindians who, nonetheless, have managed to abide, and learned to live in a world which is no longer their world ‘as they knew it.’ We soon will be all Amerindians. Let’s see what they can teach us in matters apocalyptic.

As for pessimism in general, there are two aspects which I think are sometimes conflated. I don’t really follow anti-natal philosophy in general (other than reading Ligotti’s book) but after a quick and dirty skim of David Benatar’s entry on wikipedia, I do have a lot of sympathy with the “better never to have been” argument. I had sometimes formulated the question the other way around – if you were in the godlike position of deciding whether or not to start the universe, knowing in advance all that would happen to the sentient creatures within it, would you press the button to create it? Would you create a second universe which was different but had equal amounts of pleasure and suffering within it across the span of its history?

To me, it does not take a great deal of imagination to reflect on the horrors of the world, and to move away from the button. To mention one example at the domestic level, never mind war or famine, I watched a youtube video about the case of a baby that was cooked alive in an oven. The youtuber said that he was shocked to come across numerous such examples (acts both deliberate and accidental) from various news stories. Who would create that kind of world? How many glorious sunsets, beautiful romances and life-affirming epiphanies would make up for the terrors of those dying in a fire, or suffocating beneath the rubble of a collapsed building? If you had to live all lives of all people sequentially in the universe you created, would you? Could you? Are you?

There are a couple of ways to justify this level of suffering. One is that there is some grander perspective from which this suffering is indeed justified or becomes insignificant. The infinite rapture of a life beyond this one might be worth the price of finite suffering in this one. Current suffering may be awful, future suffering may be a terrible thing to face, but past suffering may lose its sting when viewed from a glorious beyond. But this is perhaps a weakness of religion – to justify and to face the horrors of life in a supposedly “good” world created by God, you have to postulate the existence of a fantastically better world after this one.

Another idea is that terrible suffering is not real at all. Perhaps your life has been reasonable so far, your experience of pain mild and transitory, your existential malaise bearable. Perhaps before anything really bad happens, the master puppeteer will show up to announce that it is all an illusion, and you will watch yourself writhing in agony as if you were simply watching a movie. This delusion breaks down the moment the blows reign down or the fire reaches the room you are in, and he still hasn’t shown up.

Or perhaps you say that there are no objective values. To burn someone alive is merely to rearrange matter in a different form. Their screams are merely a vibration in the air. This perspective sounds unbelievably callous, but to conceive of pain and suffering in this way is somewhat similar to the “non dual” Buddhist viewpoint. If you can conceive of your own suffering in a way that renders it meaningless, does that put you beyond suffering? I have my doubts.

[Unwary Traveller]

The second aspect of pessimism which gets mixed up with that already discussed is the general idea that since this situation is terrible and we’d be better off having never existed, life itself is an unendurable misery in every aspect for everyone all the time everywhere. This seems unrealistic. Believing that everyone is equally miserable may be comforting, but it’s not true. The situation is worse than that. Life doles out its pleasures and miseries in massively unequal doses to different people at different times of their life in different places at different stages of history. Just because I am happy, or not, it may give me a false sense that others feel the same.

It would be a fine thing to appreciate life with an abiding sense of exhilaration to meet its challenges, and a sense of ecstasy in its wonders - the kind of sentiments expressed by Lingis - but it can seem as if biology has a habit of giving you just enough grudging acceptance and flickering hope to continue, without the capacity to truly enjoy what you already have. Compared to a poor working man of 150 years ago, I live a domestic life of abundant luxury, but it doesn’t necessarily result in happiness. “The abundance of energies we have to be astonished, delighted, entranced” evaporate when the alarm clock sounds on a Monday morning.

I tend to conceive of happiness as something internal that can ratchet up or down for reasons that are not always clear. If life gives you a breathing space where work is not too onerous, your health is reasonable, your responsibilities are manageable and your finances are sufficient to keep you housed and clothed without constant worry – a modestly comfortable existence in a western country perhaps – then I think happiness itself arises, or doesn’t, as a kind of “inner exultation” (to quote the article) that you have limited control over, something that is difficult to chase but may find you unexpectedly at odd moments when you aren’t searching for it. If you can learn to find a quiet joy in the quotidian, life can be beautiful, but equally there can be misery and emptiness in circumstances that should be joyful or at least comfortable.

A good way to experience this quiet joy is during random journeys to places you have no real need to be. Become “a prolific and adventurous traveler.” It need not be South America, it could be Southend. On the pier. I watched a video of a bipolar person describing his mania – “Sometimes I find myself taking the train to the end of the line for no reason.” He was wiser than he knew. You find yourself in a deserted Elvis-themed coffee shop in Skegness, during a cold February afternoon, and you are there for no reason, and you are happy for no reason. Pointless journeys with a purposeful purposelessness, to be the only person in a crowd who has no reason to be there, can give you a great sense of perspective.

Something I’ve found from psychedelics (mushrooms to be specific) is that emotional states are to some extent illusory, changing like weather systems and casting the world in terms that vary from apocalyptic dread to extremes of euphoria with very little underlying reason – emotional states seem to precede the interpretation of them rather than the other way around. You are not anxious because X is true, you think X because you are anxious. You are not happy because the state of the world is good; you think the state of the world is good because you are happy. Happiness and rationality have little to do with each other, and I think it’s better to embrace an irrational happiness, if you can, than be miserable because you think that’s more rational.

The ultimate rejoinder to antinatalism is perhaps the 1991 Latour song “People are Still Having Sex.” At the risk of going full-on Patrick Bateman, I suggest you find it on youtube, where these joys await you :

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"a hypnotic techno beat is topped with a detached male voice reporting the frequency at which folks continue to fornicate. Industrialists will find "Mark's Missionary Mix" by Mark Picchiotti most useful, while "Mo's Sleazy Mix" by Maurice Joshua will please house enthusiasts." Cashbox said the song "is excellent primer for the rest of the disc."

To have an entire philosophy shot down by "one of the quirkier tunes now breaking out of the Chicago club circuit" (to quote Billboard magazine) is perhaps the real tragedy, but this is what happens when you have “departed from conventional academic labor” and foolishly discarded the rigors of analytic philosophy.

As a parting thought, I ask “Why would you embody someone you did not wish to enslave?”

I will meet you at the airport. The fire extinguisher on the back seat? Yeah, don’t worry about that. I am your brother and I will take care of you, unwary traveller. I take care of all my puppets.

I'm fine with pessimism/nihilism as long as they aren't used selectively to oppose humanism and egalitarianism, as often happens. This is why Ligottian antinatalism is so appealing to me and other variations less so. Too often attempts at improving things in society are met with cries of, "What's the point? This is meaningless!" while the same people sit there silently and not arguing as people try to make things worse. That kind of thing irritates me -- a womblike retreat that has the effect of exacerbating suffering instead of reducing it. I think the aesthetics of pessimistic philosophy are too often used as a shield to stop from engaging critically with the world around us.

That's what I find annoying/cringe about the pessimist community, but what I like about such people is their sincerity -- especially in these irony-poisoned times where believing in something earnestly is seen as inherently worthy of hipster ridicule from those who know everything and believe in nothing.

[miguel1984]

I think if Ligotti called himself a socialist more openly, his opinions would go down much easier.

I was pretty convinced he was a socialist after I read the corporate horror stories in Teatro Grottesco. Clearly the work of somebody who equates capitalism with the highest existential evil. When I champion Ligotti to people I'm always clear on the socialist element of his fiction as many people view male-oriented philosophical horror as being of a reactionary bent due to what's seen as the "Lovecraft problem".

There's also the issue that antinatalism is often associated with the overpopulation myth much beloved of white supremacists/eco-fascists/libertarian-right. I've seen a lot of Ligotti fans repeat this, and it's disappointing. Ligotti is a humanist. It's the driving force of his antinatalism.