20.10.2006
In my last post
I have discussed the notion of a life-defining project; the two aspects of
that notion I was interested in were, first, that it is a good
candidate for making sense of the idea of finding out 'what one wants
to do with one's life', ('finding out' is not meant here as indicating that
there is an independent fact of the matter which one is supposed to discover;
rather it is understood on the lines of 'making up one's mind'); and second,
whether there is a sense in which one is required to have such a
project, such as a moral obligation. I don't think such a requirement could
be justified, but nonetheless it makes sense to make a general recommendation
(supported by reasons) that one should have such a project.
In what follows I shall try to further pin down the notion of a
life-defining project; and I'll start to examine some connections between it
and the idea behind the sort of Stoic philosophy that I discussed in
earlier posts.
1) Every project transcends at least some immediate concerns. That
is, after all, what makes it a project: a course of action that is aimed
at a goal which cannot be directly achieved, but needs intermediate
steps to be taken. It is the specifically human capacity for thought and
language that enables us to devise and carry out projects at all.
A lot of detail is in need of explanation in this area. A rough sketch of
a general picture might proceed on these lines: In order to achieve something
that is not in reach of a direct action, we have to reflect about the
current situation and the possibilities for action that it comprises, together
with the likely outcomes of these actions. Recognizing that there is no
course of action among those possibilities that leads to the desired state,
we start to construct a number of 'virtual' situations, for instance by
applying a possible course of action to the current situation and then start
over again, looking at the possibilities we have in the resulting, 'virtual'
situation, to see if among them there is one which might lead to the final
situation featuring the desired outcome. Alternatively, we may work backwards,
from a situation that would have the desired feature, and ask ourselves which
sort of situation it would take so that it opens the possibility of an action
leading to the final situation. Allowing for corrections and the incorporation
of new developments, including re-assessments of goals etc., this may count
as an outline of what is involved in formulating a project. The important
aspect is that thought is necessarily involved here. (A further question is
of course in what relation thought and language have to be conceived to
stand; I shall not divert into that issue here.)
To see why this is so, compare the explanation of an action that involves
only direct gratification of a desire. This action marks a transition,
purposively effected by an agent, from a situation in which he has a desire
to a situation in which that desire is fulfilled. An explanation of such an
action needs not to draw on any rational capacities on the part of the
agent; actually it is of a sort of explanation that may be perfectly well
applied to animals (to which we don't ascribe these capacities).
Now suppose that the current situation does not include the possibility,
for the agent, to take any direct action which would bring about the
fulfillment of his desire; but it would still be possible to achieve that
goal via an intermediate step. In this case, an explanation of his taking
that intermediate step requires to ascribe thought to the agent; at least
some thought to the effect that a) although the situation does not provide
any possibility of direct action, there is a course of action (involving
some indirect steps) which still makes it possible to achieve the desired
goal, and therefore it makes sense not to give up that goal but to try to
reach it via some intermediate step, and b), recognizing which of the
actions possible in the current situation are good candidates for a first
link in the chain of actions which will eventually lead to the desired
outcome.
We may conclude, then, that the capacity for pursuing projects in this
sense (possibly over a very large span of time, and involving a large number
of intermediate steps, and even exploring some dead-ended chains of
action etc.) is shared only be the sort of being that humans are: namely
beings capable of thought and language. (As far as our knowledge goes, that
sort is exemplified by humans only; if other candidates emerge, we might add
them to the list of species' which are of that type.) Moreover, pursuing
projects of that sort is an activity that is central to our lives. By far
the largest part of our actions is not done for some immediate goal, but is
part of some chain of actions directed towards some end that is further
remote.
Put the other way round, most of the things we want to achieve in our
lives are not of the sort that can be reached by just one immediate action;
almost all of them require us to think up some preparatory steps, or to
combine a number of actions, or to do the same thing repeatedly. Thus, we are
continuously engaged in a number of small-term projects, and also in a
few of the long-term variety.
Nothing has been said about life-defining projects so far: the projects
referred to above are merely the everyday projects, such as getting
the car washed or making sure that the party next weekend will be a success.
Moreover, this sense of 'project' is technical and perhaps somewhat
different from ordinary usage; little more is implied so far than just that a
project is some course of action towards a goal that comprises at least
some intermediate steps. Let's turn to yet another element in the concept of
a project.
2) There is also a motivational aspect to our projects. We are
not just machines working mechanically towards goals specified somehow.
When we engage with the world around us and pursue projects, then we are
moved by desires, and fulfilling them means something to us. Not being
successful hurts (both in itself and because whatever desire we had is left
frustrated), and while we can't win all the time and thus will experience
failures in our projects from time to time, we feel the strain badly if this
happens too often, or for a too long continuous time. Projects are
important for our overall well-being, and without being able to go into the
details here, I'd presume that it is not only their successful completion,
but also having projects at all, being able to devise them and pursue them,
that matters to us (it would mean a severe restriction of our freedom if we
weren't).
3) Among the characteristics of projects, then, are that they
go beyond the more immediate purposes, that they presuppose the capacity for
thought and language, and that they have motivational import. If the special
case of life-defining projects is considered, the difference between that
case and ordinary projects is often one of degree. Take the third characteristic:
projects may span smaller or larger parts of one's life; accordingly, they
will have more or less influence over one's motivation. Life-defining
projects are a limiting case of this. They are what matters most, and in a
sense they are essential for a person's life: it would not be the same life
if it would not be structured by just these projects, and often a person
may consider his life a failure if his life-defining projects fail.
The second characteristic, that projects presuppose the capacity for
thought and language, seems, at first glance, not to apply in a higher
degree to life-defining projects than to others. In order to have
life-defining projects, one doesn't have to be more capable to think or use
language than one needs to be when following one's everyday tasks. (And what
could this mean anyway, 'to be more capable of thought and using
language'?) But there is a sense in which the second characteristic plays
a more important role in life-defining projects than in other projects,
namely, that one would put a lot more thinking (and more careful and intense
thinking) into projects that one takes to be life-defining.
What about the first characteristic? Life-defining projects may transcend
one's life span, for instance in their goals, or in themselves, when they are
not one-person projects but larger ones, in which many people and possibly
generations take part. This is the sort of project which clearly cannot be
successfully completed by a single person, such as fighting hunger and
poverty in the world. A different sort would seek orientation in spiritual
enlightenment, or furthering the advancement of art or science. While
these types of projects focus on large and somewhat abstract developments,
there are others which are centered around personal relationships - one may
simply be motivated by the desire to ensure a better future for one's
children. In all these cases there is an element that is anchored somewhere
outside one's own lifetime (and thus also outside one's possible control;
more on that below).
Could there be a life-defining project that is not so anchored, that is,
a project that merely covers one's own lifetime (or part of it), but does
not go beyond that? Imagine someone is primarily motivated by an egoistic
concern - perhaps the desire to amass as much money as possible. Would this
count as a life-defining project? I think we must allow this to count as one
indeed. This means that there is a sort of life-defining project that
is life-immanent, as opposed to the externally anchored variety described
above. (A nice, if totally unrealistic, example of a purely life-immanent but
strongly life-defining project is that of Wowbagger, a character in
Douglas Adams' satirical novel Life, the Universe, and Everything.
He has the by-name 'the Infinitely Prolonged', since he has accidentally
gained immortality; being bored with his overly long lifetime now, he
decides to perform the extraordinary task of meeting every creature in
the universe exactly once and insulting them - and to do this in alphabetical
order! Of course, as so often in a Douglas Adams novel this perfectly
thought-through project is frustrated in a subtle and unexpected way: after
the plot has unfolded all its complications, including some involving time
travel, Wowbaggers precisely calculated trajectory through the universe
confronts him with a single person, the hero of the book, a second time, and
he notes surprised: "I've done you before, haven't I?")
Note that even this sort of project actually shares with other projects
the first characteristic, that it transcends some immediate concerns. But
it seems that this characteristic does not necessarily scale, in
something like this sense: Small projects transcend short-term concerns,
large projects transcend long-term concerns, lifelong projects transcend that
particular life's time and any considerations that the person who lives that
life may take to apply to himself. It's actually not scaling like that,
probably not even for the larger-scale projects; but in any case,
life-defining projects that are strictly life-immanent do not point outside
one's lifetime.
4) As far as life-defining projects are concerned, there is a
certain asymmetry with respect to the beginning and the end of one's life.
On the one hand, obviously nobody has life-defining projects at the time of
one's birth, and for a while later. If there are such projects in a life,
then they are formed during a more mature stage of it. (There is no
contradiction involved in there being several different life-defining
projects formulated at different stages of one's life; but none of them
starts before a certain age is reached.) On the other hand, projects may
have been completed at a person's death, or they may be interrupted by it,
in which case they will often be considered as a failure, or at any rate as
at best partly successful. Death, then, can have a heavier impact on one's
projects than one's birth could possibly have: the course of a project can
be stopped in the middle of its execution by one's death, but one isn't
thrown into a running project at the beginning of one's life.
Committing to a project is a decision, and committing to a life-defining
project is an especially important one. (One may gradually come to think
of a certain project in which one is engaged as life-defining; or a project
may grow more important as one's life develops. So it is not necessarily
a decision that one takes at a specific, given moment. But it is still a
decision that one makes, and usually a much more careful and perhaps
laborious one than many others in one's life.) Therefore, in order to get
started with that sort of project, it is necessary to have an idea of
importance, and also a grasp of the idea that one's lifetime is limited,
that there is a finite number of things one can do, or goals one can reach,
and that any decision to engage in a project involves allocating some of
that most valuable resource. (One should also take into account that this
resource trickles away, and eventually runs out, even when one does not
engage in any projects.)
Thus death can be an external factor that has an impact on one's projects,
but birth can't. This is perhaps one of the reasons why the idea of their own
death is horrible to many people; however, if that fear is fear of
cancellation of a life-defining project, then it is mistaken. If such a
project fails, then the time after the failure may be sad and depressing,
and fearing that period may be understandable, albeit unhelpful. (Moreover,
failures may be seen as instructive at the time when they happen, and the
circumstances may just be so that the failure generates new projects with
equal or even higher motivational force). But if a life-defining project is
interrupted by one's death, then there is obviously no danger of getting
into such a state - so whatever one might fear in fearing one's death, it
cannot (reasonably) be the disruption of one's life-defining projects.
Or that's how it seems. But doesn't committing to a life-defining project
at least in some instances mean that one commits to something that one takes
to transcend one's life? In the discussion above, it turned out that at least
some life-defining project are anchored in something that lies outside one's
lifetime. The goals that give such projects their direction may include some
which are not necessarily to be enjoyed by oneself when they are fulfilled.
For instance, if one's life-defining project is to help reduce poverty, or
analphabetism, there is no incoherence in supposing that one will not live
to see the eventual success of it (even though one might wish one will), but
still pursue it with all one's energy. (There is also no inconsistency in
the extreme decision to give one's life for such a project[1]).
In this constellation, fearing one's death because it will spoil a
life-defining project (or more precisely, perhaps not the project itself but
at least one's own contribution to it) seems to make more sense.
5) The sort of life that is recommended by a Stoic philosophy
(along the lines discussed in my previous posts about Rational self-examination and Life-defining projects)
can be seen as following a particular life-defining project. The central
idea is to make sure that as much as possible of one's lifetime is used
in a way that coheres with reason; this is ensured by reflection on one's
actions and by training oneself to examine one's actions rationally.
If this is accepted as a viable formulation of a life-defining project,
then it seems that it must be of the externally anchored variety which I
distinguished, in Section 3) above, from the life-immanent one. Perhaps not
obviously so: at first glance it seems that this sort of life-defining project
merely governs the actions that are taken during a life, in analogy to the
project that guides the man who merely tries to amass money (or to the project
of Wowbagger) in the example above. But there is an element that goes beyond
the events in that life, namely, that the agent has to trust in the value of
an examined life (and besides that in the valuelessness of pretty much
everything else). This is supposedly based in a very fundamental aspect of
human nature, and thus it transcends whatever individual life is in question.
(There is a parallel, as far as this aspect is concerned, between Stoic
philosophy and most, if not all, religions.)
But this is problematic for a Stoic position: even if no outright
contradiction can be derived from this sort of project being externally
anchored, there is certainly a danger of becoming incoherent. Externally
anchored projects involve taking a risk, since they are bound up with an
interpretation that transcends one's life. Since one does not have full
control over something that transcends one's life, one can never be sure
whether one isn't misled there in one way or another. But the ideal for a
Stoic is not to have anything outside his control. (All the more since the
Stoic project of complete rationality is also of that kind, and how can he
consistently take that project, including the risk involved?)
Perhaps Stoic philosophers could argue that the point of their philosophy
is rather not to install a belief-system but that their theories are
intended to help people to live untormented lives. By rational
self-examination, it is assumed, adherents to a Stoic philosophical outlook
will come to eliminate emotions from their collection of motivations and thus,
ideally, reach a state where they will be entirely self-sufficient. (Note
that eliminating emotions from a motivational set is not identical with
erasing the possibility to experience any emotions; at least not obviously
so.[2][3]) If that line of defense is correct, the Stoic recommendation
can be taken as describing a life-immanent project instead of an externally
anchored one, and thus avoid the problem posed in the last paragraph.
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[1] See Bernard Williams, "Persons, character and morality", in:
Moral Luck. Philosophical Papers 1973-1980, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press 1981, 1-19, 13.
[2] See Seneca, Epistulae morales ad Lucilium, IX, 2-3.
[3] The term 'motivational set' is taken from Bernard Williams,
"Internal and External Reasons", op. cit., 101-113.
