We will say with confidence that, sometime, there will likely be no extra human beings. That implies 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, in the end, are identical to particular person people: in the end, this too shall move.
I don’t wish to knock makes an attempt to make progress on this planet. My life, and so many others, are immeasurably higher than had been these a whole bunch of years in the past, within the brief time we’ve 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 folks 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 truly appears comparatively utopian to me – and by doing so, reveals us the boundaries of utopia itself. Even when we will envision a fabric utopia that we take do be as fascinating as that one appears, and we predict 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 stay our lives, understanding 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 feel 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 similar a lovely 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 reasonably than focus obsessively on the long run.
We wouldn’t have 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 had been 80 000 years lengthy and can at some point drop to 10 years, however then begin coming again up. There’s no motive to imagine that story factually. However Steven Collins suspects it by no means was supposed to provide a factual account of historical past, however as a substitute to provide 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 feel it could possibly assist us in the long run as nicely.
I don’t wish 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 instances we’ve right here worse. Ladies, above all, have been saved down for 1000’s or extra years; the previous couple hundred years have abolished slavery, as a observe recognized all through the remainder of human historical past. Issues did get higher! Folks do mirror on their scenario, and transfer it in a path of making an attempt to make it higher, and that may be a good factor. I simply don’t wish to make that motion extra important than it’s. Ultimately, as Ecclesiastes would say, it too is a self-importance of vanities. There may be solely a lot that it’ll repair earlier than human beings are gone and none of it issues anymore.
The place then does this all depart us? Effectively, all of us should deal one way or the other with the actual fact of our personal particular person deaths. Many people search to do that by one thing that can outlast us, whether or not revolutionary social change, an excellent murals, or our descendants. However that strategy doesn’t suffice to cope with the deaths of these issues we’ve 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 smart phrases from Epicurus:
dying, essentially the most horrifying of dangerous issues, is nothing to us; since once we exist, dying is just not but current, and when dying is current, then we don’t exist. Subsequently, it’s related neither to the residing 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 gained’t care that we’re lifeless – whether or not the “we” stands for every indivdual or for all the species. The eventual dying of the species makes it extra pressing to stay within the current second reasonably than in an envisioned future. For Epicurus as for the Daoists, solely the current is our happiness. We have to surrender the hope of “I’ll be joyful when…” – not solely individually, that I will likely be joyful after some downside in my life is mounted, however collectively, that we will likely be joyful when some main social downside is mounted. Dwelling nicely means residing nicely now, on this planet we’ve. All of this, in flip, is simpler stated than completed; that’s why I’d been so suspicious of Daoist sudden liberation. Generally it’s essential spend this current second working onerous 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 objective – or not less than a objective, a vital one.
So I feel there are not less than two methods one can moderately 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 to be revolutionary. One is to simply 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 “reasonably fragile and native achievement”. The opposite is to reject the declare and certainly discover absolutely the good down right here, in the great thing about every particular person second. Each of those responses appear to me reasonably Daoist. Both manner, we take what we’ve bought within the current, reasonably than placing our religion sooner or later.
