The question, “What is the meaning of life?” was once taken to be a paradigm of
philosophical inquiry. Perhaps, outside of the academy, it still is. In philosophy
classrooms and academic journals, however, the question has nearly disappeared, and
when the question is brought up, by a naïve student, for example, or a prospective donor
to the cause of a liberal arts education, it is apt to be greeted with uncomfortable
embarrassment.

What is so wrong with the question? One answer is that it is extremely obscure, if
not downright unintelligible. It is unclear what exactly the question is supposed to be
asking. Talk of meaning in other contexts does not offer ready analogies for
understanding the phrase “the meaning of life.” When we ask the meaning of a word, for
example, we want to know what the word stands for, what it represents. But life is not
part of a language, or of any other sort of symbolic system. It is not clear how it could
“stand for” anything, nor to whom. We sometimes use “meaning” in nonlinguistic
contexts: “Those dots mean measles.” “ Those footprints mean that someone was here
since it rained.” In these cases, talk of meaning seems to be equivalent to talk of
evidence, but the contexts in which such claims are made tend to specify what hypotheses
are in question within relatively fixed bounds. To ask what life means without a
similarly specified context, leaves us at sea.

Still, when people do ask about the meaning of life, they are evidently expressing
some concern or other, and it would be disingenuous to insist that the rest of us haven’t
the faintest idea what that is. The question at least gestures toward a certain set of
concerns with which most of us are at least somewhat familiar. Rather than dismiss a
question with which many people have been passionately occupied as pure and simple
nonsense, it seems more appropriate to try to interpret it and reformulate it in a way that
can be more clearly and unambiguously understood. Though there may well be many
things going on when people ask, “What is the meaning of life?”, the most central among
them seems to be a search to find a purpose or a point to human existence. It is a request
to find out why we are here (that is, why we exist at all), with the hope that an answer to
this question will also tell us something about what we should be doing with our lives.
If understanding the question in this way, however, makes the question
intelligible, it might not give reason to reopen it as a live philosophical problem. Indeed,
if some of professional philosophy’s discomfort with discussion of the meaning of life
comes from a desire to banish ambiguity and obscurity from the field, as much comes, I
think, from the thought that the question, whenmade clearer, has already been answered,
and that the answer is depressing. Specifically, if the question of the Meaning of Life is
to be identified with the question of the purpose of life, then the standard view, at least
among professional philosophers, would seem to be that it all depends on the existence of
God. In other words, the going opinion seems to be that if there is a God, then there is at
least a chance that there is a purpose, and so a meaning to life. God may have created us
for a reason, with a plan in mind. But to go any further along this branch of thinking is
not in the purview of secular philosophers.

If, on the other hand, there is no God, then there can be no meaning, in the sense of a point or a purpose to our existence. We are Thomas Nagel has what might be thought to be an even more pessimistic view –
viz, that even if there is a God, there is no reason God’s purpose should be our purpose,
no reason, therefore, to think that God’s existence could give meaning, in the right sense,
to our lives. We are simply a product of physical processes – there are no reasons for our existence, just causes.
At the same time that talk of Life having a Meaning is banished from philosophy,
however, the talk of lives being more or less meaningful seems to be on the rise.
Newspapers, magazines, self-help manuals are filled with essays on how to find meaning
in your life; sermons and therapies are built on the truism that happiness is not just a
matter of material comfort, or sensual pleasure, but also of a deeper kind of fulfillment.
Though philosophers to date have had relatively little to say about what gives meaning to
individual lives, passing references can be found throughout the literature; it is generally
acknowledged as an intelligible and appropriate thing to want in one’s life. Indeed, it
would be crass to think otherwise.

But how can individual lives have meaning if life as a whole has none? Are those
of us who suspect there is no meaning to life deluding ourselves in continuing to talk
about the possibility of finding meaning in life? (Are we being short-sighted, failing to
see the implications of one part of our thought on another?) Alternatively, are these
expressions mere homonyms, with no conceptual or logical connections between them?
Are there simply two wholly unconnected topics here?

Many of you will be relieved to hear that I do not wish to revive the question of
whether there is a meaning to life. I am inclined to accept the standard view that there is
no plausible interpretation of that question that offers a positive answer in the absence of
a fairly specific religious metaphysics. An understanding of meaningfulness in life, however, does seem to me to merit more philosophical attention than it has so far
received, and I will have some things to say about it here. Here, too, I am inclined to
accept the standard view – or a part of the standard view – viz., that meaningfulness is an
intelligible feature to be sought in a life, and that it is, at least sometimes attainable but
not everywhere assured. But what that feature is – what we are looking for – is
controversial and unclear, and so the task of analyzing or interpreting that feature will
take up a large portion of my remarks today. With an analysis proposed, I shall return to
the question of how a positive view about the possibility of meaning in lives can fit with
a negative or agnostic view about the meaning of life. The topics are not, I think, as
unconnected as might at first seem necessary for their respectively optimistic and
pessimistic answers to coexist. Though my discussion will offer nothing new in the way
of an answer to the question of the meaning of life, therefore, it may offer a somewhat
different perspective on that question’s significance.

Let us begin, however, with the other question, that of understanding what it is to
seek meaning in life. What do we want when we want a meaningful life? What is it that
makes some lives meaningful, others less so?
If we focus on the agent’s, or the subject’s, perspective – on a person wanting
meaning in her life, her feeling the need for more meaning – we might incline toward a
subjective interpretation of the feature being sought. When a person self-consciously
looks for something to give her life meaning, it signals a kind of unhappiness. One
imagines, for example, the alienated housewife, whose life seems to her to be a series of
endless chores. What she wants, it might appear, is something that she can find more
subjectively rewarding.

This impression is reinforced if we consider references to “meaningful
experiences.” (The phrase might be applied, for example, to a certain kind of wedding or
funeral.) The most salient feature of an event that is described is meaningful seems to be
its “meaning a lot” to the participants. To say that a ceremony, or, for that matter, a job,
is meaningful seems at the very least to include the idea that it is emotionally satisfying.
An absence of meaning is usually marked by a feeling of emptiness and dissatisfaction; in contrast, a meaningful life, or meaningful part of life, is necessarily at least somewhat
rewarding or fulfilling. It is noteworthy, however, that meaningful experiences are not
necessarily particular happy. A trip to one’s birthplace may well be meaningful; a visit to
an amusement park is unlikely to be so.

If we step back, however, and ask ourselves, as observers, what lives strike us as
especially meaningful, if we ask what sorts of lives exemplify meaningfulness, subjective
criteria do not seem to be in the forefront. Who comes to mind? Perhaps, Ghandi, or
Albert Schweitzer, or Mother Theresa; perhaps Einstein or Jonas Salk. Cezanne, or
Manet, Beethoven, Charlie Parker. Tolstoy is an interesting case to which I shall return.
Alternatively, we can look to our neighbors, our colleagues, our relatives – some of
whom, it seems to me, live more meaningful lives than others. Some, indeed, of my
acquaintance seem to me to live lives that are paradigms of meaning – right up there with
the famous names on the earlier lists; while others (perhaps despite their modicum of
fame) would score quite low on the meaningfulness scale. If those in the latter category
feel a lack of meaning in their lives – well, they are right to feel it, and it is a step in the
right direction that they notice that there is something about their lives that they should
try to change.

What is it to live a meaningful life, then? What does meaningfulness in life
amount to? It may be easier to make progress by focusing on what we want to avoid. In
that spirit, let me offer some paradigms, not of meaningful, but of meaningless lives.
For me, the idea of a meaningless life is most clearly and effectively embodied in
the image of a person who spends day after day, or night after night, in front of a
television set, drinking beer and watching situation comedies. Not that I have anything
against television or beer. Still the image, understood as an image of a person whose life
is lived in hazy passivity, a life lived at a not unpleasant level of consciousness, but
unconnected to anyone or anything, going nowhere, achieving nothing – is, I submit, as
strong an image of a meaningless life as there can be. Call this case The Blob.
If any life, any human life, is meaningless, the Blob’s life is. But this doesn’t
mean that any meaningless life must be, in all important respects, like the Blob’s. There
are other paradigms that highlight by their absences other elements of meaningfulness.
In contrast to the Blob’s passivity, for example, we may imagine a life full of
activity, but silly or decadent or useless activity. (And again, I have nothing against silly
activity, but only against a life that is wholly occupied with it.) We may imagine, for
example, one of the idle rich who flits about, fighting off boredom, moving from one
amusement to another. She shops, she travels, she eats at expensive restaurants, she
works out with her personal trainer.

Curiously, one might also take a very un-idle rich person to epitomize a
meaningless life in a slightly different way. Consider, for example, the corporate
executive who works twelve-hour, seven-day weeks, suffering great stress, for the sole
purpose of the accumulation of personal wealth. Related to this perhaps is David
Wiggins’ example of the pig farmer who buys more land to grow more corn to feed more
pigs to buy more land to grow more corn to feed more pigs.

These last three cases of the idle rich, the corporate executive and the pig farmer
are in some ways very different, but they all share at least this feature: they can all be
characterized as lives whose dominant activities seem pointless, useless, or empty.
Classify these cases under the heading Useless.
A somewhat different and I think more controversial sort of case to consider
involves someone who is engaged, even dedicated, to a project that is ultimately revealed
as bankrupt, not because the person’s values are shallow or misguided, but because the
project fails. The person may go literally bankrupt: for example, a man may devote his
life to creating and building up a company to hand over to his children, but the item his
company manufactures is rendered obsolete by technology shortly before his planned
retirement. Or consider a scientist whose life’s work is rendered useless by the
announcement of a medical breakthrough just weeks before his own research would have
yielded the same results. Perhaps more poignantly, imagine a woman whose life is
centered around a relationship that turns out to be a fraud. Cases that fit this mold we
may categorize under the heading Bankrupt.

The classification of this third sort of case as an exemplification of
meaninglessness may meet more resistance than the classification of the earlier two.
Perhaps these lives should not be considered meaningless after all. Nonetheless, these
are cases in which it is not surprising that an argument of some sort is needed – it is not
unnatural or silly that the subjects of these lives should entertain the thought that their
lives have been meaningless. Even if they are wrong, the fact that their thoughts are not,
so to speak, out of order, is a useful datum. So, of course, would be the sort of thing one
would say to convince them, or ourselves, that these thoughts are ultimately mistaken.
If the cases I have sketched capture our images of meaninglessness more or less
accurately, they provide clues to what a positive case of a meaningful life must contain.
In contrast to the Blob’s passivity, a person who lives a meaningful life must be actively
engaged. But, as the Useless cases teach us, it will not do to be engaged in just anything,
for any reason or with any goal – one must be engaged in a project or projects that have
some positive value, and in some way that is nonaccidentally related to what gives them
value. Finally, in order to avoid Bankruptcy, it seems necessary that one’s activities be at
least to some degree successful (though it may not be easy to determine what counts as
the right kind or degree of success). Putting these criteria together, we get a proposal for
what it is to live a meaningful life: viz., a meaningful life is one that is actively and at
least somewhat successfully engaged in a project (or projects) of positive value.

Several remarks are needed to qualify and refine this proposal. First, the use of
the word “project” is not ideal: it is too suggestive of a finite, determinate task, something
one takes on, and, if all goes well, completes. Among the things that come to mind as
projects are certain kinds of hobbies or careers, or rather, specific tasks that fall within
the sphere of such hobbies or careers: things that can be seen as Accomplishments, like
the producing of a proof or a poem or a pudding, the organizing of a union or a high
school band. Although such activities are among the things that seem intuitively to
contribute to the meaningfulness of people’s lives, there are other forms of
meaningfulness that are less directed, and less oriented to demonstrable achievement, and
we should not let the use of the word “project” distort or deny the potential of these
things to give meaningfulness to life. Relationships, in particular, seem at best
awkwardly described as projects. Rarely does one deliberately take them on and, in some
cases, one doesn’t even have to work at them – one may just have them and live, as it
were, within them. Moreover, many of the activities that are naturally described as
projects – coaching a school soccer team, planning a surprise party, reviewing an article
for a journal – have the meaning they do for us only because of their place in the
nonprojectlike relationships in which we are enmeshed and with which we identify. In
proposing that a meaningful life is a life actively engaged in projects, then, I mean to use
“projects” in an unusually broad sense, to encompass not only goal-directed tasks but
other sorts of ongoing activities and involvements as well.

Second, the suggestion that a meaningful life should be “actively engaged” in
projects should be understood in a way that recognizes and embraces the connotations of
“engagement.” Although the idea that a meaningful life requires activity was introduced
by contrast to the life of the ultra-passive Blob, we should note that meaning involves
more than mere, literal activity. The alienated housewife, presumably, is active all the
time – she buys groceries and fixes meals, cleans the house, does the laundry, chauffeurs
the children from school to soccer to ballet, arranges doctors’ appointment and
babysitters. What makes her life insufficiently meaningful is that her heart, so to speak,
isn’t in these activities. She does not identify with what she is doing – she does not
embrace her roles as wife, mother, and homemaker as expressive of who she is and wants
to be. We may capture her alienated condition bysaying that though she is active, she is
not actively engaged. (She is, one might say, just going through the motions.) In
characterizing a meaningful life, then, it is worth stressing that living such a life is not
just a matter of having projects (broadly construed) and actively and somewhat
successfully getting through them. The projects must engage the person whose life it is.
Ideally, she would proudly and happily embrace them, as constituting at least part of what
her life is about.

Finally, we must say more about the proposal’s most blatantly problematic
condition – viz, that the projects engagement with which can contribute to a meaningful
life must be projects “of positive value”. The claim is that meaningful lives must be
engaged in projects of positive value – but who is to decide which projects have positive
value, or even to guarantee that there is such a thing?

I would urge that we leave the phrase as unspecific as possible in all but one
respect. We do not want to build a theory of positive value into our conception of
meaningfulness. As a proposal that aims to capture what most people mean by a
meaningful life, what we want is a concept that “tracks” whatever we think of as having
positive value. This allows us to explain at least some divergent intuitions about
meaningfulness in terms of divergent intuitions or beliefs about what has positive value,
with the implication that if one is wrong about what has positive value, one will also be
wrong about what contributes to a meaningful life. (Thus, a person who finds little to
admire in sports – who finds ridiculous, for example, the sight of grown men trying to
knock a little ball into a hole with a club , will find relatively little potential for meaning
in the life of an avid golfer; a person who places little stock in esoteric intellectual
pursuits will be puzzled by someone who strains to write, much less read, a lot of books
on supervenience.)

The exception I would make to this otherwise maximally tolerant interpretation of
the idea of positive value is that we exclude merely subjective value as a suitable
interpretation of the phrase.

It will not do to allow that a meaningful life is a life involved in projects that seem
to have positive value from the perspective of the one who lives it. Allowing this would
have the effect of erasing the distinctiveness of our interest in meaningfulness; it would
blur or remove the difference between an interest in living a meaningful life and an
interest in living a life that feels or seems meaningful. That these interests are distinct,
and that the former is not merely instrumental to the latter can be seen by reflecting on a
certain way the wish or the need for meaning in one’s life may make itself felt. What I
have in mind is the possibility of a kind of epiphany, in which one wakes up – literally or
figuratively – to the recognition that one’s life to date has been meaningless. Such an
experience would be nearly unintelligible if a lack of meaning were to be understood as a
lack of a certain kind of subjective impression. One can hardly understand the idea of
waking up to the thought that one’s life to date has seemed meaningless. To the contrary,
it may be precisely because one did not realize the emptiness of one’s projects or the
shallowness of one’s values until that moment that the experience I am imagining has the
poignancy it does. It is the sort of experience that one might describe in terms of scales
falling from one’s eyes. And the yearning for meaningfulness, the impulse to do
something about it will not be satisfied (though it may be eliminated) by putting the
scales back on, so to speak. If one suspects that the life one has been living is
meaningless, one will not bring meaning to it by getting therapy or taking a pill that,
without changing one’s life in any other way, makes one believe that one’s life has
meaning.

To care that one’s life is meaningful, then, is, according to my proposal, to care
that one’s life is actively and at least somewhat successfully engaged in projects
(understanding this term broadly) that not just seem to have positive value, but that really
do have it. To care that one’s life be meaningful, in other words, is in part to care that
what one does with one’s life is, to pardon the expression, at least somewhat objectively
good. We should be careful, however, not to equate objective goodness with moral
goodness, at least not if we understand moral value as essentially involving benefiting or
honoring humanity. The concern for meaning in one’s life does not seem to be the same
as the concern for moral worth, nor do our judgments about what sorts of lives are
meaningful seem to track judgments of moral character or accomplishment.
To be sure, some of the paradigms of meaningful lives are lives of great moral
virtue or accomplishment – I mentioned Ghandi and Mother Theresa, for example.
Others, however, are not. Consider Gauguin, Wittgenstein, Tchaikovsky – morally
unsavory figures all, whose lives nonetheless seem chock full of meaning. If one thinks
that even they deserve moral credit, for their achievements made the world a better place,
consider instead Olympic athletes and world chess champions, whose accomplishments
leave nothing behind but their world records. Even more important, consider the artists,
scholars, musicians, athletes of our more ordinary sort. For us too, the activities of
artistic creation and research, the development of our skills and our understanding of the
world give meaning to our lives – but they do not give moral value to them.
It seems then that meaning in life may not be especially moral, and that indeed
lives can be richly meaningful even if they are, on the whole, judged to be immoral.
Conversely, that one’s life is at least moderately moral, that it is lived, as it were, above
reproach, is no assurance of its being moderately meaningful. The alienated housewife,
for example, may be in no way subject to moral criticism. (and it is debatable whether
even the Blob deserves specifically moral censure.)

That people do want meaning in their lives, I take it, is an observable, empirical
fact. We have already noted the evidence of self-help manuals, and therapy groups.
What I have offered so far is an analysis of what that desire or concern amounts to. I
want now to turn to the question of whether the desire is one that it is good that people
have, whether, that is, there is some positive reason why they should want this.
At a minimum, we may acknowledge that it is at least not bad to want meaning in
one’s life. There is, after all, no harm in it. Since people do want this, and since there are
no moral objections to it, we should recognize the concern for meaning as a legitimate
concern, at least in the weak sense that people should be allowed to pursue it. Indeed,
insofar as meaningfulness in one’s life is a significant factor in a life’s overall well-being,
we should do more than merely allow its pursuit: we should positively try to increase
opportunities for people to live lives of meaning.

Most of us, however, seem to have a stronger positive attitude toward the value of
meaningfulness than this minimum concession admits. We do not think it is merely all
right for people to want meaning in their lives – as it is all right for people to like country
music, or to take an interest in figure-skating. We think people positively ought to care
that their lives be meaningful. It is disturbing, or at least regrettable, to find someone
who doesn’t care about this. Yet this positive assessment ought to strike us, at least
initially, as somewhat mysterious. What is the good, after all, of living a meaningful life,
and to whom?

Since a meaningful life is not necessarily a morally better life than a meaningless
one (the Olympic athlete may do no more good nor harm thanthe idly rich socialite), it is
not necessarily better for the world that people try to live or even succeed in living
meaningful lives. Neither is a meaningful life assured of being an especially happy one,
however. Many of the things that give meaning to our lives (relationships to loved ones,
aspirations to achieve) make us vulnerable to pain, disappointment and stress. From the
inside, the Blob’s hazy passivity may be preferable to the experience of the tortured artist
or political crusader. By conventional standards, therefore, it is not clear that caring
about or even succeeding in living a meaningful life is better for the person herself.

Yet, as I have already mentioned, those of us who do care that our lives be
meaningful tend to think that it is a positively good thing that we do. We not only want
to live meaningful lives, we want to want this – we approve of this desire, and think it is
better for others if they have this desire, too. If, for example, you see a person you care
about conducting her life in a way that you find devoid of worth – she is addicted to
drugs, perhaps, or just to television, or she is overly enthusiastic in her career as a
corporate lawyer – you are apt to encourage her to change, or at least hope that she will
find a new direction on her own. Your most prominent worry may well be that she is
heading for a fall. You fear that at some point she will wake up to the fact that she has
been wasting or misdirecting her life, a point that may come too late for easy remedy and
will, in any case, involve a lot of pain and self-criticism. But the fear that she will wake
up to the fact that she has been wasting her life (and have difficulty turning her life
around) may not be as terrible is the fear that she won’t wake up to it. If you came to feel
secure that no painful moment of awakening would ever come because your friend (or
sister or daughter) simply does not care whether her life is meaningful, you might well
think that this situation is not better but worse. We seem to think there is something
regrettable about a person living a meaningless life, even if the person herself does not
mind that she is. We seem to think she should want meaning in her life, even if she
doesn’t realize it.

What, though, is the status of this “should”, the nature or source of the regret?
The mystery that I earlier suggested we should feel about our value in meaningfulness is
reflected in the uneasy location of this judgment. If my own reaction to the woman who
doesn’t care whether her life is meaningful is typical, the thought that she should, or
ought to care is closer to a prudential judgment than it is to a moral one. (If there is a
moral objection to a person who lives a meaningless life and is content with that, it is not,
in my opinion, a very strong one. The Blob, after all, is not hurting anyone, nor is the
idle rich jet-setter. She may, for example, give money to environmental causes to offset
the damage she is doing in her SUV, and write generous checks to Oxfam and UNICEF
on a regular basis.) The thought that it is too bad if a person does not live a meaningful
life (even if she doesn’t mind) seems rather to be the thought that it is too bad for her.
The closest analogue to this thought in the history of ethics of which I am aware is
Aristotle’s conception of eudaimonia. His conception of the virtuous life as the happiest
life is offered as a conclusion of an enlightened self-interest. According to standard
conceptions of self-interest, however (either hedonistic or preference-based), it is not
obvious why this should be so, and, unfortunately, Aristotle himself does not address the
question explicitly. Rather, he seems to think that if you do not just see that the virtuous
life, in which one aims for and achieves what is “fine,” is a better, more desirable life for
yourself, that just shows that you were not well brought up, and in that case, there is no
point trying to educate you.

Our question, the question of whether and what kind of reason there is for a
person to strive for a meaningful life, is not quite the same as the question of whether and
what kind of reason there is to aspire to virtue, – though, when one is careful to interpret
“virtue” in the broad and not specifically moral way that Aristotle uses the term, it is
closer than it might seem. Still, as I say, Aristotle does not really address the question,
and so, though I take my line of thought to be Aristotelian in spirit, a scholarly study of
Aristotle’s texts is not likely to be an efficient way of finding an answer to the question
ourselves.

What reason is there, then, if any, for a person to want to live a meaningful life? I
have said that we seem to think it would be better for her, that it is, at least roughly, in her
self-interest. At the same time, the thought that she should care about meaning seems to
depend on claims from outside herself. Even if there are no desires latent in her
psychology which meaningfulness would satisfy, we seem to think, there is reason why
she should have such desires. She seems to be making some kind of mistake.

If my analysis of what is involved in living a meaningful life is right, then the
question of why one should care about living a meaningful life is equivalent to the
question of why one should care that one’s life be actively and somewhat successfully
engaged in projects of positive value. The source of perplexity seems, in particular, to be
about the reason to care that one’s projects be positively valuable. As long as you are
engaged by your activities, and they make you happy, why should one care that one’s
activities be objectively worthwhile?

The answer, I believe, is that to devote one’s life entirely to activities whose value
is merely subjective, to devote oneself to activities whose sole justification is that it is
good for you, is, in a sense I shall try to explain, practically solipsistic. It flies in the face
of one’s status as, if you will, a tiny speck in a vast universe, a universe with countless
perspectives of equal status with one’s own, from which one’s life might be assessed.
Living a life that is engaged with and so at least partially focussed on projects whose
value has a nonsubjective source is a way of acknowledging one’s non-privileged
position. It harmonizes, in a way that a purely egocentric life does not, with the fact that
one is not the center of the universe.

The basic idea is this: The recognition of one’s place in the universe, of one’s
smallness, one might say, or one’s insignificance, and of the independent existence of the
universe in which one is a part involves, among other things, the recognition of “the
mereness” of one’s subjective point of view. To think of one’s place in the universe is to
recognize the possibility of a perspective, of infinitely many perspectives, really, from
which one’s life is merely gratuitous; it is to recognize the possibility of a perspective, or
rather of infinitely many perspectives, that are indifferent to whether one exists at all, and
so to whether one is happy or sad, satisfied or unsatisfied, fulfilled or unfulfilled.
In the face of this recognition, a life that is directed solely to its subject’s own
fulfillment, or, to its mere survival or towards the pursuit of goals that are grounded in
nothing but the subject’s own psychology, appears either solipsistic or silly.

A person who lives a largely egocentric life – who devotes, in other words, lots of
energy and attention and care toward himself, who occupies himself more specifically
with satisfying and gratifying himself, expresses and reveals a belief that his happiness
matters. Even if it doesn’t express the view that his happiness matters objectively, it at
least expresses the idea that it matters to him. To be solely devoted to his own
gratification, then, would express and reveal the fact that his happiness is all that matters,
at least all that matters to him. If, however, one accepts a framework that recognizes
distinctions in nonsubjective value, (and if one believes, as seems only reasonable, that
what has nonsubjective value has no special concentration in or connection to oneself)
this attitude seems hard to justify.
To accept that framework is, after all, to accept the view that some things are
better than others. To me, it makes sense partially to understand this literally: Some
things, it seems to me, are better than others: people, for example, are better than rocks
or mosquitoes, and a Vermeer painting is better than the scraps on my compost heap.

What is essential, though, is that accepting a framework that recognizes distinctions in
nonsubjective value involves seeing the world as value-filled, as containing with it
distinctions of better and worse, of more and less worthwhile, if not of better and worse
objects per se, then of better and worse features of the world, or activities, or
opportunities to be realized. Against this background, a life solely devoted to one’s own
gratification or to the satisfaction of one’s whims seems gratuitous and hard to defend.
For, as I have said, to live such a life expresses the view that one’s happiness is all that
matters, at least to oneself. But why should this be the only thing that matters, when there
is so much else worth caring about?

Those familiar with Thomas Nagel’s book, The Possibility of Altruism, may have
recognized an allusion to it in my suggestion that a life indifferent to meaning was
practically solipsistic. The allusion is significant, for the argument I am making here,
though it is directed to a different conclusion, bears a strong resemblance to the argument
of that book. Nagel’s argument invites us to see a person who, while evidently trying to
avoid or minimize pain to himself, shows total indifference to the pain of others, as a
practical solipsist in the sense that he fails, in his practical outlook, to recognize and
appreciate that he is one person among others, equally real. Roughly, the suggestion
seems to be that if you appreciate the reality of others, then you realize that their pains are
just as painful as yours. If the painfulness of your pain is a reason to take steps to avoid
it, then, the painfulness of their pain should provide reasons, too. To be totally
indifferent to the pain of others, then, bespeaks a failure to recognize their pain (to
recognize it, that is, as really painful, in the same way that yours is painful to you).
This is not the occasion to discuss the plausibility of Nagel’s interpretation of the
pure egoist as a practical solipsist, nor even to describe Nagel’s complex and subtle
position in enough detail to be able fairly to evaluate it. What I want to call attention to
has to do not with the substance of the argument but with the type of argument it is:
specifically, Nagel’s argument suggests that appreciation of a certain fact – in this case,
the fact that you are just one person among others, equally real – is a source of practical
reason – in this case, it gives you reason to take the pains of others to constitute reasons
for action. If Nagel is right, we have reason to care about the pain of others that is
grounded, not in our own psychologies (and more specifically, not in any of our own
desires), but in a fact about the world. His suggestion is that a person who fails to see the
pain of others as a source of reason acts ‘as if’ the pain of others is not real, or not
painful. But of course the pain of others is real and is painful. Such a person thus
exhibits a failure not just of morality or sympathy, but of practical reason, in the sense
that his practical stance fails to accord with a very significant fact about the world.
My suggestion that we have reason to care about and to try to live meaningful
rather than meaningless lives resembles Nagel’s in form. Like him, I am suggesting that
we can have a reason to do something or to care about something that is grounded not in
our own psychologies, nor specifically in our own desires, but in a fact about the world.
The fact in question in this case is the fact that we are, each of us, specks in a vast and
value-filled universe, and that as such we have no privileged position as a source of or
possessor of objective value. To devote oneself wholly to one’s own satisfaction seems
to me to fly in the face of this truth, to act “as if” one is the only thing that matters, or
perhaps, more, that one’s own psychology is the only source of (determining) what
matters. By focusing one’s attention and one’s energies at least in part on things,
activities, aspects of the world that have value independent of you, you implicitly
acknowledge your place and your status in the world. Your behavior, and your practical
stance is thus more in accord with the facts.

Admittedly, this is not the sort of reason that one must accept on pain of
inconsistency or any other failure of logic. Just as a person may simply not care whether
her life is meaningful, so she may also simply not care whether her life is in accord with,
or harmonizes with the facts. (It is one thing to say we should live in accord with the
facts of physics, geography, and the other sciences. Living in accordance with these facts
has evident instrumental value – it helps us get around in the world. But living in a way
that practically acknowledges, or harmonizes with the fact that we are tiny specks in a
value-filled world will not make our lives go better that way.) Such a person cannot be
accused in any strict sense of irrationality. Like noninstrumental reasons to be moral, the
reason to care about living a worthwhile life is not one that narrow rationality requires
one to accept. At the same time, it seems appropriate to characterize my suggestion (and
Nagel’s) as one that appeals to reason in a broader sense. For my suggestion is that an
interest in living a meaningful life is an appropriate response to a fundamental truth, and
that failure to have such a concern constitutes a failure to acknowledge that truth.
As we have already seen, the truth to which I am proposing a meaningful life
provides a response is the truth that we are, each of us, tiny specks in a vast and value-
filled universe. Like the truth that we are, each of us, one person among others, equally
real, it opposes what children and many adults may have a tendency to assume – namely,
that they are the center of the universe, either the possessor or the source of all value. (It
is because both Nagel’s truth and mine are opposites of that assumption that both might
plausibly be understood as alternatives to practical solipsism.) Unlike Nagel’s truth,
mine is not specifically addressed to our relation to other people. A person may,
therefore, appreciate and practically express one of these truths and not the other.
Whereas an appropriate response to the equal reality of other people may be, if Nagel is
right, an embrace of morality or something relating to morality, my proposal is that an
appropriate response to our status as specks in a vast universe is a concern and aspiration
to have one’s life wrapped up with projects of positive value.

Perhaps, however, I have not made it clear why this is an appropriate response.
The question may seem especially pressing because the thought that we are tiny specks in
a vast universe, and the sense that it calls for or demands a response has, in the past,
tended to move philosophers in a different direction. Specifically, the thought that we are
tiny specks in a vast universe was in the past closely associated with that murky and
ponderous question to which I referred at the beginning of my talk – the question of The
Meaning of Life. The thought that we are tiny specks in a vast universe has indeed often
evoked that question, and, to those who either do not believe in or do not want to rest
their answers in the existence of a benevolent God, it has more or less immediately
seemed also to indicate an answer. Considering their answer to the question of the
Meaning of Life and contrasting it with my response to the fact of our smallness, may
clarify the substance of my proposal.
The train of thought I have in mind is one that has, with variations, been
expressed by many distinguished philosophers, including Camus, Tolstoy, Richard
Taylor, and, curiously, Nagel himself. For them, the recognition of our place in the
universe – our smallness, or are speckness, if you will – seems to warrant the conclusion
not only that there is no meaning to life as such but also that each individual life is
necessarily absurd.

On the view of these philosophers, a life can be meaningful only if it can mean
something to someone, and not just to someone, but to someone other than oneself and
indeed someone of more intrinsic or ultimate value than oneself. Of course, anyone can
live in such a way as to make her life meaningful to someone other than herself. She can
maintain her relationship with parents and siblings, establish friendships with neighbors
and colleagues. She can fall in love. If all else fails, she can have a child who will love
her, or two children, or six. She can open up an entire clinic for God’s sake. But if a life
that is devoted solely to yourself, a life that is good to no one other than yourself lacks
meaning, these philosophers not implausibly think, so will a life that is devoted to any
other poor creature, for he or she will have no more objective importance than you have,
and so will be no more fit a stopping place by which to ground the claim of
meaningfulness than you. Nor, according to this train of thought, will it help to expand
your circle, to be of use or to have an effect on a larger segment of humankind. If each
life is individually lacking in meaning, then the collective is meaningless as well. If each
life has but an infinitesimal amount of value, then although one’s meaning will increase in proportion to one’s effect, the total quantity of meaning relative to the cosmos will remain so small as to make the effort pathetic.

From the perspective of these philosophers, if there is no God, then human life,
each human life, must be objectively meaningless, because if there is no God, there is no
appropriate being for whom we could have meaning.

From this perspective, my suggestion that the living of a worthwhile life
constitutes a response to a recognition of our place in the universe might seem
ridiculously nearsighted, as if, having acknowledged the mereness of my own
subjectivity, I then failed to acknowledge the equal mereness of the subjectivity of others.
But I think this misunderstands the point in my proposal of living a life that realizes
nonsubjective value, a misunderstanding that derives from too narrow a view about what
an appropriate and satisfactory response to the fact of our place in the universe must be.
The philosophers I have been speaking about – we can call them the pessimists -
take the fundamental lesson to be learned from the contemplation of our place in the
universe to be that we are cosmically insignificant, a fact that clashes with our desire to
be very significant indeed. If God existed, such philosophers might note, we would have
a chance at being significant. For God himself, is presumably very significant and so we
could be significant by being or by making ourselves significant to Him. In the absence
of a God, however, it appears that we can only be significant to each other, to beings, that
is, as pathetically small as ourselves. We want to be important, but we cannot be
important, and so our lives are absurd.
The pessimists are right about the futility of trying to make ourselves important.
Insofar as contemplation of the cosmos makes us aware of our smallness, whether as
individuals or as a species, we simply must accept it and come to terms with it. Some
people do undoubtedly get very upset, even despondent when they start to think about
their cosmic insignificance. They want to be important, to have an impact on the world,
to make a mark that will last forever. When they realize that they cannot achieve this,
they are very disappointed. The only advice one can give to such people is: Get Over It.
Rather than fight the fact of our insignificance, however, and of the mereness of
our subjectivity, my proposal is that we live in a way that acknowledges the fact, or, at
any rate, that harmonizes with it. Living in a way that is significantly focussed on,
engaged with, and concerned to promoted or realize value whose source comes from
outside of oneself, does seem to harmonize with this, whereas living purely
egocentrically does not. Living lives that attain or realize some nonsubjective value may
not make us meaningful, much less important, to anyone other than ourselves, but it will
give us something to say, to think, in response to the recognition of perspectives that we
ourselves imaginatively adopt that are indifferent to our existence and to our well-being.

At the beginning of this paper, I raised the question of how the meaning of life –
or the absence of such meaning – was related to the meaningfulness of particular lives.
As I might have put it, does it really make sense to think that there can be meaningful
lives in a meaningless world? In light of this discussion, we can see how the answer to
that question might be “yes” while still holding on to the idea that the similar wording of
the two phrases is not merely coincidental.

If I am right about what is involved in living a meaningful life – if, that is, living a
meaningful life is a matter of at least partly successful engagement in projects of positive
value – then the possibility of living meaningful lives despite the absence of an overall
meaning to life can be seen to depend on the fact that distinctions of value (that is, of
objective value) do not rely on the existence of God or of any overarching urpose to the
human race as a whole. Whether or not God exists, the fact remains that some objects,
activities and ideas are better than others. Whether or not God exists, some ways of
living are more worthwhile than others. Some activities are a waste of time.
People are sometimes tempted to think that if God doesn’t exist, then nothing
matters. They are tempted to think that if we will all die, and eventually all traces of our
existence will fade from all consciousness, there is no point to doing anything; nothing
makes any difference. Tolstoy evidently thought this sometimes, and gave eloquent
voice to that view. But the reasoning is ridiculous. If one activity is worthwhile and
another is a waste, then one has reason to prefer the former, even if there is no God to
look down on us and approve. More generally, we seem to have reason to engage
ourselves with projects of value whether God exists and gives life a purpose or not.
Putting things this way, however, fails to explain why we use the language of
meaning to describe lives engaged in activities of worth. Putting things this way there
seems to be no connection at all between the question of whether there is a meaning to
life and the question of whether individual lives can be meaningful. I believe, however,
that there is a connection, that shows itself, or perhaps that consists in the fact that the
wish for both kinds of meaning are evoked by the same thought, and that, perhaps, either
kind of meaning would be an appropriate and satisfying response to that thought. The
thought in question is the thought (the true thought) that we are tiny specks in a vast
universe. It is a thought that is apt to be upsetting when it first hits you – at least in part
because, looking back from that position, it may seem that one had until then lived “as if”
something opposite were true. One had lived perhaps until then as if one were the center
of the universe, the sole possessor or source of all value. One had all along assumed one
had a special and very important place in the world, and now one’s assumption is
undermined. One can see how, in this context, one might wish for a meaning to life. For
if there were a meaning – a purpose, that is, to human existence that can be presumed to
be of great importance, then, by playing a role, by contributing to that purpose, one can
recover some of the significance one thought one’s life had. Like the pessimistic
philosophers I talked about a few minutes ago, I doubt that that path is open to us. But
there seems another way one can respond to the thought, or to the recognition of our
relatively insignificant place in the universe, that is more promising, and that can, and
sometimes does, provide a different kind of comfort. If one lived one’s life, prior to the
recognition of our smallness, as if one was the center of the universe, the appropriate
response to that recognition is simply to stop living that way. If one turns one’s attention
to other parts of the universe – even to other specks like oneself – in a way that
appreciates and engages with the values or valuable objects that come from outside
oneself, then one corrects one’s practical stance. If, in addition, one is partly successful
in producing, preserving, or promoting value – if one does some good, or realizes value,
then one has something to say, or to think in response to the worry that one’s life has no
point.

Only if some suggestion like mine is right can we make sense of the intuitions
about meaningfulness to which I called attention in the earlier part of this paper.
According to those intuitions the difference between a meaningful and a meaningless life
is not a difference between a life that does a lot of good, and a life that does a little. (Nor
is it a difference between a life that makes a big splash and one that, so to speak, sprays
only a few drops.) It is rather a difference between a life that does good or is good or
realizes value and a life that is essentially a waste.

According to these intuitions, there is as sharp a contrast between the Blob and a life devoted to the care of a single needy individual as there is between the Blob and someone who manages to change the world for the better on a grand scale. Indeed, there may be an equally sharp contrast between the Blob and the monk of a contemplative order whose existence confers no benefit or change on anyone else’s life at all. Ironically, along this dimension, Tolstoy fares exceptionally well.

Thus it seems to me that even if there is no meaning to life, even if, that is, life as
a whole has no purpose, no direction, no point, that is no reason to doubt the possibility
of finding and making meaning in life – that is no reason, in other words, to doubt the
possibility of people living meaningful lives. In coming to terms with our place and our
status in the universe, it is natural and appropriate that people should want to explore the
possibility of both types of meaning. Even if philosophers have nothing new or
encouraging to say about the possibility of meaning of the first sort, there may be some
point to elaborating the different meanings of the idea of finding meaning in life, and in
pointing out the different forms that coming to terms with the human condition can take.

“I got the world by the balls and yet I can’t stop feeling that I am a loser.” Tony Soprano, “The Happy Wanderer”

Fans of The Sopranos acknowledge, with glee, that Tony Soprano has the world by the balls. When Tony is crossed — if someone owes him money, attempts to hold him to a contract, or harms something he cares about (be it a person or a racehorse) — the audience is primed to think “Don’t they know who they are dealing with? This is Tony Soprano.” Tony’s reactions rarely fail to support the viewers’ conviction that Tony Soprano is not to be messed with. And we admire the character for this. No one takes us seriously when we talk about “wanting to wring” someone’s neck.
In review after review Tony gets described as “lusty”. The dictionary has this as either lasciviousness or a pronounced vitality. When it comes to Tony, take your pick. Tony, when it comes to what he wants, has both aim (the lasciviousness) and reach (the vitality.) This makes Tony admirable in way number two: we like a man who knows what he wants and knows how to get it.
It seems like Tony has got it all. He wants money? Other people have money? He takes it for himself. He wants a family but girlfriends too? He makes it happen. And the mystery we want to address: why despite all that he has attained, does Tony feels like a loser? In the show, we look to Tony’s therapist Dr. Melfi to explain what is wrong with Tony. In this chapter, we’ll look to the diagnosis ancient philosophers would offer. That’s right, what would Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics and the Epicureans have to say about the happiness of a self-described “fat crook from Jersey”? We’ll see that they have plenty to say. Tony Soprano, who has hardly changed at all from his psychotherapy, could really benefit from a little philosophy.

Tony on Happiness
Tony, for all of his blustery anti-intellectualism, shows signs of having thought a bit about happiness. He seems to have discerned three different approaches to happiness, that of the “whiners,” the “happy wanderers”, and the “Gary Cooper”-types. His therapist Dr. Melfi’s aim, as he sees it, is make him a “whiner”, to get him to blame others (his parents) for his unhappiness and make him “feel like a victim” (The Happy Wanderer). If she succeeded, Tony thinks he would be like the “fucking Americans nowadays” who he describes as “pussies — crying, complaining, confessing.”
Tony distains the “whiners”, but it is animosity he feels for the “happy wanderers.” These “assholes” don’t need therapy and move through life cheerily oblivious to its trials and setbacks. Now, Tony would rather be a “happy wanderer” than a “whiner” but expresses this with the following: “Sometimes, if I see a guy with a clear head, you know the type, always whistling like the Happy Fucking Wanderer. I see this and… I wanna walk up to him and rip his fucking’ throat open. For no reason at all. Just go up to him and fucking pummel him.” (The Happy Wanderer). Despite being able to imagine this diatribe including that these types get their kicks from doing things like visiting zoos, Tony quite enjoyed acting the “happy wanderer” on the day he was made giddy by a new girlfriend and zoo visit.
It is Gary Cooper that attracts Tony the most, however. “First day I came here (to therapy) first fucking day I said how Gary Cooper was a man. Strong. Silent.” (The Happy Wanderer). Of course, what it is that “Gary Cooper” has is elusive to Tony, who is not even clear on what he understands to be “Gary Cooper”-like. He idealizes his father by putting him in the “Gary Cooper” category: his dad ran his own crew back when the mob had “values”. Yet at the same time Tony acknowledges that his mother “wore [his father] down to a little nub. He was a squeaking gerbil when he died.” (Pilot).
Does it seem far-fetched to suggest that ancient Greek philosophy can help clear up Tony’s confusion about happiness? Perhaps it ought not to, not even within the context of the show. The show’s writers have Tony read the following quotation in Bowdoin College’s Admissions Building (College): “No man can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude without finally getting bewildered as to which may be true.” The author, Nathaniel Hawthorne, was undoubtedly inspired by the work of ancient thinkers when he composed this line. It reflects the ideas first put forward by Plato. In The Republic Plato has Socrates explain that happiness is a matter of organizing a harmony between the parts of one’s self. We ought to make ourselves a “perfect unity, rather than a plurality, self-disciplined and internally attuned.” And our actions must be consistent with this aim, so that we “preserve and promote” an internal harmony (Plato, Republic, book 4, 443c-d). Looking to the ancient Greeks for an explanation of what this internal harmony consists in shows up the deficiencies in Tony’s understanding of happiness. In particular, the ancients provide us with clear and more useful accounts of both the cause and effects of actual happiness. Tony neither needs to feel like a “victim” nor does he need to think that happiness is no more than a matter of fleeting moods. Even more significantly, in contrast to Dr. Melfi, who, in four years of treating Tony has hardly breached the subject, ancient philosophy can explain what is at stake in Tony’s continuing his life of crime.

The Ancients on Happiness and Tony and the Rest of Us
Despite his extraordinary talent for satisfying his more immediate desires, in the following respect Tony is not so different from the rest of us. We, like Tony, tend to think of happiness as a matter of having certain things in our lives. We expect to be happy once we get to college, or get our degree, or have a family and settle down. Or, if we have these things and get asked if we are happy, we respond with a list what we have and ask back “Who could ask for anything more?” According to Aristotle, people in ancient Greece were confused in the same way as we are today on the subject of happiness. Aristotle, in the Rhetoric, summarizes what was a matter of general agreement at the time. What seems, then, to have been a matter of ancient “common sense” is the suggestion that happiness is a matter of achieving a list of things: a good family, lots of friends, wealth, reputation, honor, old age…
But the ancient ethicists explain that happiness is not a matter of merely having things. The Stoics, in response to a list like that in Aristotle’s Rhetoric, write that “not even an abundance of these goods… makes a difference to the happiness, desirability, or value of one’s life.” The Epicureans believe that if we think deeply enough about happiness we will come to realize that good birth, wealth, reputation, honor and even a good old age do not directly contribute to our happiness.
There are two components to the difficulty of happiness, according to the ancient Greeks. First, happiness is a matter of activity—not acquisition. As Aristotle writes, “activities are what give life its character.” We cannot merely pursue and attain a good family, lots of friends, wealth, reputation, honor, and old age and expect to be happy. (How much easier if we could, huh?) Second, happiness is not something we can stumble into, despite Tony’s suspicions about the “happy wanderers”. To live a happy life requires a conscious effort to revise and integrate the goals we have picked up from a common sense understanding of what makes life good. The aims we have, before thinking philosophically about our lives, inevitably conflict. This is demonstrated in a spectacular way by Tony Soprano, who aims to be both a loving father and a murderer. Hawthorne’s quotation seems readily applicable to Tony, but does it apply to the rest of us? We, might pursue family and a career, do we have two faces as well? Something as seemingly benign as trying to “juggle” family and career can perpetuate a misunderstanding of what it is to be happy if we think we only need to strike the right “balance” between these pursuits. This would be to think of happiness as a matter of things we can achieve, rather than as a way to live our lives. Like Tony Soprano, our efforts to “juggle” different goals may keep us from following Plato’s recommendation—not an external harmony (just enough work and just enough play) but an internal harmony.

Happiness as a Matter of Integrated Motivations—The View of the Ancient Ethicists
What is it to make ourselves internally harmonious? The idea is rather simple, actually. We must merely reflect upon, and then revise, what it is we are really after when it comes to our pursuits. Doing this successfully, however, is not easy. It usually does not occur to the unsatisfied politician that he is aiming, above all, for glory. It is hard for habitually irresponsible to realize that they are living for pleasure and that this is the problem. But once we come to recognize what motivates us, either as a whole or in regard to particular aspects of our lives, the ancient imperative is to continue to pursue only those things whose motivation is one that can integrate all of our pursuits. What does this mean? If we realize we take jobs with higher salaries for the sake of how powerful this makes us feel, we have to recognize that power is not what motivates us to care for our families. In the case of Tony, his reasons for murdering are not the same as the ones he has for attempting to set a good example for his children. His adultery is not motivated by the same motivation he has for loving his wife. Living the way Tony does creates the sort of internal schism that Hawthorne describes. But the rest of us might also be making choices that are inconsistent when considered together. The consequence of this is a fractured personality. There are no more memorable descriptions of such a personality than Plato’s. Plato describes the fractured personality as being in a “civil war” with itself. He has us imagine that, if we fail to reconcile our motivations to one another, parts of ourselves “bite each other, fight and try to eat each other.” (Plato, Republic, 589a)
A working parent might experience this inner conflict, but the situation worsens if you live a life like Tony Soprano’s. In the Republic, Plato imagines what would happen to a person who gets put into a position of power over others, having not yet integrated his motivations for even the typical activities of a life. This exacerbates the already disorganized condition of a person, and, despite the public appearance of “having it all”, the potential is for such a person to be more unhappy than any of us. They have, in addition to more common tensions, worries about enemies and usurpers. Plato writes that such a person is like “an exhausted body” which “is compelled to compete and fight with other bodies all its life.” (Plato, Republic, 579c-d) The situation renders one friendless and terrified.
So it is no wonder that Tony does not feel well. The advice Plato would give Tony would be to leave the mob immediately. We mentioned that when it comes to what he wants, Tony has both aim and reach. He needs to reset his aims. He needs to aim for happiness. This requires that he become “self-disciplined and internally attuned”, and Tony has to understand that he can strive for this only to the exclusion of an array of his current aims. Until Tony figures this out, the pursuits that seem good to him are actually only distractions from happiness. So it turns out that Tony’s unusual ability to get what he wants really only hurts him.
As we all should, Tony needs to employ what Epicurus describes as “sober reasoning” — sober reasoning which “works out the causes of every choice and avoidance” and drives out “false beliefs” about what we ought to be pursuing. Until we have revised our lives in accordance with the results of this process, we should not expect to find life satisfying. Until we reflect on our choices and answer to our satisfaction what the point of our efforts is—we will be pursuing desires that are, as Aristotle explains, “empty and pointless” and inherently unsatisfying. For most of us, this type of reflection about our lives won’t mean we have to drop many of our life’s activities, like Tony Soprano would have to. It may be that we will keep the very same pursuits we currently have (love, career, family). These pursuits will merely come to mean to us what they can mean to us consistently. The psychological effects of this are what the ancients think are necessary for true happiness.

Objections to the Integrated Motivations View (and a Reply)
Some contemporary ethicists object to the ancient account of happiness in the following way: the ancients think they can recommend a happy life as if it and an ethical life are one and the same, but really, whatever the psychological benefits of working from a consistent set of motivations, they amount to neither happiness nor morality. The dispute about what constitutes happiness will be ongoing, and is capable of being settled only in the way philosophical debates typically are: through slow and steady attempts to come to terms with the opposing view by incorporating its insights or by explaining away its apparent advantages. On the second point, as to whether the ancients are recommending a moral life in recommending a life of internal harmony — we can begin to address this using the writers’ portrayal of Tony Soprano.
Critics of ancient philosophy contend that working from a set of consistent motivations is possible for even a Mafioso. So let us consider whether Tony could show one face to the world, yet have it be that of a mob boss. First of all, imagine all that he would have to give up. His family would be recruited to kill like he does, since all secrecy and shame about his profession would be out the window. Of course, his family would not be able to pass as they do in civilized society. They would be living more like outlaws in the Kentucky hills. And if Tony embraced his criminality—would he be as successful a criminal? For example, if everyone who dealt with him knew his history, would they continue to deal with him? Tony sometimes needs to sometimes wear a public face of respectability. He would be out of business were he not two-faced. It seemed obvious to the ancients: there is no way for a bad person to integrate his aims.
The show’s portrayal of Tony reveals something else as well: in order to live with himself Tony needs to think of himself as not so bad a guy. If we just imagine a bad guy, we would be able to overlook this feature of such a lifestyle. We too often imagine evil villains twirling their mustaches with glee– bad guys are more like Tony. And, as the show poignantly demonstrates: they don’t like themselves. They have to pretend they are not what they are. (“I’m not saying I’m perfect, but I do the right thing by my family,” Tony tells Dr. Melfi at the end of season three.)

Gary Cooper
Tony is right to think that Gary Cooper serves as a sort of contrast to himself. In High Noon, Gary Cooper plays a sheriff who must fight a returning band of outlaws. Though he was counting on their assistance, the townspeople refuse to help because they would rather disappoint the sheriff than to get on the bad side of the outlaws. Despite this, the character remains as Tony describes him, strong and silent. These are the effects of what Aristotle described as a life that is “self-sufficient.” Self-sufficiency is, for Aristotle, a requirement for happiness. Later ancients use the term in describing the happy life. In a happy and self-sufficient life, one’s contentment withstands the slights that trigger Tony. Without the aid of a philosophical account of happiness, Tony is left unaware that the difference between “Gary Cooper” and himself is neither a matter of brute strength nor the values of an era, but the sort of desires each pursues. Just imagine Tony plopped into Gary Cooper’s role in High Noon. Wouldn’t he be torturing his old neighbors before (and then after) the noon train arrives? You can’t mess with Tony Soprano, and the townspeople would not get away with their betrayal. Gary Cooper’s character is not after vengeance and does not think he has to get the townspeople under his control. Not desiring to have the world “by the balls” gives Gary Cooper’s character a chance to retain a sort of self-possession that Tony really can only marvel at. We could put it this way: Gary Cooper’s character cannot be messed with despite what the townspeople do or fail to do.
In contrast, Tony assumes people recognize him as a “sad clown” (Pilot). Hearing this shocks Dr. Melfi, as it would others who see Tony as a far more ominous figure. But a clown puts on a show for others, prancing around until he gets the right reaction. If we consider whether we can imagine Tony not doing the things he predictably does, we realize how few of Tony’s actions are self-directed and how little control Tony actually exerts over his choices. (Can he stop cheating on his wife? Can he forgive and forget, even once?) Why is Tony’s getting revenge so predictable? Perhaps it is because Tony, who, as we mentioned, we admire for being stronger than we are, is instead weaker. He differs from us in being unable to control the desire to strike back.
When Dr. Melfi suggests that behavior therapy might help Tony to control his anger triggers, Tony stops to consider the possibility. Without these triggers, “then how do you get people to do what you want?” (Employee of the Month). Tony has traded in self-control for the ability to manipulate those around him. This should make us rethink our assessment of Tony Soprano. He doesn’t really have the world “by the balls.” That is only the illusion, perpetuated by our own misunderstandings of happiness. It is the other way round, the world has that grip on Tony. Tony knows this. If he only also knew this: a happy man in the ancient sense attempts to control not the world but himself. This is no fool’s errand, which makes it unlike so many of the errands of Tony Soprano, sad clown.

Consciousness poses the most baffling problems in the science of the mind. There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience, but there is nothing that is harder to explain. All sorts of mental phenomena have yielded to scientific investigation in recent years, but consciousness has stubbornly resisted. Many have tried to explain it, but the explanations always seem to fall short of the target. Some have been led to suppose that the problem is intractable, and that no good explanation can be given.

To make progress on the problem of consciousness, we have to confront it directly. In this paper, I first isolate the truly hard part of the problem, separating it from more tractable parts and giving an account of why it is so difficult to explain. I critique some recent work that uses reductive methods to address consciousness, and argue that such methods inevitably fail to come to grips with the hardest part of the problem. Once this failure is recognized, the door to further progress is opened. In the second half of the paper, I argue that if we move to a new kind of nonreductive explanation, a naturalistic account of consciousness can be given. I put forward my own candidate for such an account: a nonreductive theory based on principles of structural coherence and organizational invariance and a double-aspect view of information.
2 The easy problems and the hard problem

There is not just one problem of consciousness. “Consciousness” is an ambiguous term, referring to many different phenomena. Each of these phenomena needs to be explained, but some are easier to explain than others. At the start, it is useful to divide the associated problems of consciousness into “hard” and “easy” problems. The easy problems of consciousness are those that seem directly susceptible to the standard methods of cognitive science, whereby a phenomenon is explained in terms of computational or neural mechanisms. The hard problems are those that seem to resist those methods.

The easy problems of consciousness include those of explaining the following phenomena:
# the ability to discriminate, categorize, and react to environmental stimuli;
# the integration of information by a cognitive system;
# the reportability of mental states;
# the ability of a system to access its own internal states;
# the focus of attention;
# the deliberate control of behavior;
# the difference between wakefulness and sleep.

All of these phenomena are associated with the notion of consciousness. For example, one sometimes says that a mental state is conscious when it is verbally reportable, or when it is internally accessible. Sometimes a system is said to be conscious of some information when it has the ability to react on the basis of that information, or, more strongly, when it attends to that information, or when it can integrate that information and exploit it in the sophisticated control of behavior. We sometimes say that an action is conscious precisely when it is deliberate. Often, we say that an organism is conscious as another way of saying that it is awake.

There is no real issue about whether these phenomena can be explained scientifically. All of them are straightforwardly vulnerable to explanation in terms of computational or neural mechanisms. To explain access and reportability, for example, we need only specify the mechanism by which information about internal states is retrieved and made available for verbal report. To explain the integration of information, we need only exhibit mechanisms by which information is brought together and exploited by later processes. For an account of sleep and wakefulness, an appropriate neurophysiological account of the processes responsible for organisms’ contrasting behavior in those states will suffice. In each case, an appropriate cognitive or neurophysiological model can clearly do the explanatory work.

If these phenomena were all there was to consciousness, then consciousness would not be much of a problem. Although we do not yet have anything close to a complete explanation of these phenomena, we have a clear idea of how we might go about explaining them. This is why I call these problems the easy problems. Of course, “easy” is a relative term. Getting the details right will probably take a century or two of difficult empirical work. Still, there is every reason to believe that the methods of cognitive science and neuroscience will succeed.

The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience.

It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience. But the question of how it is that these systems are subjects of experience is perplexing. Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing, we have visual or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emotion? It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.

If any problem qualifies as the problem of consciousness, it is this one. In this central sense of “consciousness”, an organism is conscious if there is something it is like to be that organism, and a mental state is conscious if there is something it is like to be in that state. Sometimes terms such as “phenomenal consciousness” and “qualia” are also used here, but I find it more natural to speak of “conscious experience” or simply “experience”. Another useful way to avoid confusion (used by e.g. Newell 1990, Chalmers 1996) is to reserve the term “consciousness” for the phenomena of experience, using the less loaded term “awareness” for the more straightforward phenomena described earlier. If such a convention were widely adopted, communication would be much easier; as things stand, those who talk about “consciousness” are frequently talking past each other.

The ambiguity of the term “consciousness” is often exploited by both philosophers and scientists writing on the subject. It is common to see a paper on consciousness begin with an invocation of the mystery of consciousness, noting the strange intangibility and ineffability of subjectivity, and worrying that so far we have no theory of the phenomenon. Here, the topic is clearly the hard problem – the problem of experience. In the second half of the paper, the tone becomes more optimistic, and the author’s own theory of consciousness is outlined. Upon examination, this theory turns out to be a theory of one of the more straightforward phenomena – of reportability, of introspective access, or whatever. At the close, the author declares that consciousness has turned out to be tractable after all, but the reader is left feeling like the victim of a bait-and-switch. The hard problem remains untouched.
3 Functional explanation

Why are the easy problems easy, and why is the hard problem hard? The easy problems are easy precisely because they concern the explanation of cognitive abilities and functions. To explain a cognitive function, we need only specify a mechanism that can perform the function. The methods of cognitive science are well-suited for this sort of explanation, and so are well-suited to the easy problems of consciousness. By contrast, the hard problem is hard precisely because it is not a problem about the performance of functions. The problem persists even when the performance of all the relevant functions is explained. (Here “function” is not used in the narrow teleological sense of something that a system is designed to do, but in the broader sense of any causal role in the production of behavior that a system might perform.)

To explain reportability, for instance, is just to explain how a system could perform the function of producing reports on internal states. To explain internal access, we need to explain how a system could be appropriately affected by its internal states and use information about those states in directing later processes. To explain integration and control, we need to explain how a system’s central processes can bring information contents together and use them in the facilitation of various behaviors. These are all problems about the explanation of functions.

How do we explain the performance of a function? By specifying a mechanism that performs the function. Here, neurophysiological and cognitive modeling are perfect for the task. If we want a detailed low-level explanation, we can specify the neural mechanism that is responsible for the function. If we want a more abstract explanation, we can specify a mechanism in computational terms. Either way, a full and satisfying explanation will result. Once we have specified the neural or computational mechanism that performs the function of verbal report, for example, the bulk of our work in explaining reportability is over.

In a way, the point is trivial. It is a conceptual fact about these phenomena that their explanation only involves the explanation of various functions, as the phenomena are functionally definable. All it means for reportability to be instantiated in a system is that the system has the capacity for verbal reports of internal information. All it means for a system to be awake is for it to be appropriately receptive to information from the environment and for it to be able to use this information in directing behavior in an appropriate way. To see that this sort of thing is a conceptual fact, note that someone who says “you have explained the performance of the verbal report function, but you have not explained reportability” is making a trivial conceptual mistake about reportability. All it could possibly take to explain reportability is an explanation of how the relevant function is performed; the same goes for the other phenomena in question.

Throughout the higher-level sciences, reductive explanation works in just this way. To explain the gene, for instance, we needed to specify the mechanism that stores and transmits hereditary information from one generation to the next. It turns out that DNA performs this function; once we explain how the function is performed, we have explained the gene. To explain life, we ultimately need to explain how a system can reproduce, adapt to its environment, metabolize, and so on. All of these are questions about the performance of functions, and so are well-suited to reductive explanation. The same holds for most problems in cognitive science. To explain learning, we need to explain the way in which a system’s behavioral capacities are modified in light of environmental information, and the way in which new information can be brought to bear in adapting a system’s actions to its environment. If we show how a neural or computational mechanism does the job, we have explained learning. We can say the same for other cognitive phenomena, such as perception, memory, and language. Sometimes the relevant functions need to be characterized quite subtly, but it is clear that insofar as cognitive science explains these phenomena at all, it does so by explaining the performance of functions.

When it comes to conscious experience, this sort of explanation fails. What makes the hard problem hard and almost unique is that it goes beyond problems about the performance of functions. To see this, note that even when we have explained the performance of all the cognitive and behavioral functions in the vicinity of experience – perceptual discrimination, categorization, internal access, verbal report – there may still remain a further unanswered question: Why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience? A simple explanation of the functions leaves this question open.

There is no analogous further question in the explanation of genes, or of life, or of learning. If someone says “I can see that you have explained how DNA stores and transmits hereditary information from one generation to the next, but you have not explained how it is a gene”, then they are making a conceptual mistake. All it means to be a gene is to be an entity that performs the relevant storage and transmission function. But if someone says “I can see that you have explained how information is discriminated, integrated, and reported, but you have not explained how it is experienced”, they are not making a conceptual mistake. This is a nontrivial further question.

This further question is the key question in the problem of consciousness. Why doesn’t all this information-processing go on “in the dark”, free of any inner feel? Why is it that when electromagnetic waveforms impinge on a retina and are discriminated and categorized by a visual system, this discrimination and categorization is experienced as a sensation of vivid red? We know that conscious experience does arise when these functions are performed, but the very fact that it arises is the central mystery. There is an explanatory gap (a term due to Levine 1983) between the functions and experience, and we need an explanatory bridge to cross it. A mere account of the functions stays on one side of the gap, so the materials for the bridge must be found elsewhere.

This is not to say that experience has no function. Perhaps it will turn out to play an important cognitive role. But for any role it might play, there will be more to the explanation of experience than a simple explanation of the function. Perhaps it will even turn out that in the course of explaining a function, we will be led to the key insight that allows an explanation of experience. If this happens, though, the discovery will be an extra explanatory reward. There is no cognitive function such that we can say in advance that explanation of that function will automatically explain experience.

To explain experience, we need a new approach. The usual explanatory methods of cognitive science and neuroscience do not suffice. These methods have been developed precisely to explain the performance of cognitive functions, and they do a good job of it. But as these methods stand, they are only equipped to explain the performance of functions. When it comes to the hard problem, the standard approach has nothing to say.
4 Some case-studies

In the last few years, a number of works have addressed the problems of consciousness within the framework of cognitive science and neuroscience. This might suggest that the analysis above is faulty, but in fact a close examination of the relevant work only lends the analysis further support. When we investigate just which aspects of consciousness these studies are aimed at, and which aspects they end up explaining, we find that the ultimate target of explanation is always one of the easy problems. I will illustrate this with two representative examples.

The first is the “neurobiological theory of consciousness” outlined by Crick and Koch (1990; see also Crick 1994). This theory centers on certain 35-75 hertz neural oscillations in the cerebral cortex; Crick and Koch hypothesize that these oscillations are the basis of consciousness. This is partly because the oscillations seem to be correlated with awareness in a number of different modalities – within the visual and olfactory systems, for example – and also because they suggest a mechanism by which the binding of information contents might be achieved. Binding is the process whereby separately represented pieces of information about a single entity are brought together to be used by later processing, as when information about the color and shape of a perceived object is integrated from separate visual pathways. Following others (e.g., Eckhorn et al 1988), Crick and Koch hypothesize that binding may be achieved by the synchronized oscillations of neuronal groups representing the relevant contents. When two pieces of information are to be bound together, the relevant neural groups will oscillate with the same frequency and phase.

The details of how this binding might be achieved are still poorly understood, but suppose that they can be worked out. What might the resulting theory explain? Clearly it might explain the binding of information contents, and perhaps it might yield a more general account of the integration of information in the brain. Crick and Koch also suggest that these oscillations activate the mechanisms of working memory, so that there may be an account of this and perhaps other forms of memory in the distance. The theory might eventually lead to a general account of how perceived information is bound and stored in memory, for use by later processing.

Such a theory would be valuable, but it would tell us nothing about why the relevant contents are experienced. Crick and Koch suggest that these oscillations are the neural correlates of experience. This claim is arguable – does not binding also take place in the processing of unconscious information? – but even if it is accepted, the explanatory question remains: Why do the oscillations give rise to experience? The only basis for an explanatory connection is the role they play in binding and storage, but the question of why binding and storage should themselves be accompanied by experience is never addressed. If we do not know why binding and storage should give rise to experience, telling a story about the oscillations cannot help us. Conversely, if we knew why binding and storage gave rise to experience, the neurophysiological details would be just the icing on the cake. Crick and Koch’s theory gains its purchase by assuming a connection between binding and experience, and so can do nothing to explain that link.

I do not think that Crick and Koch are ultimately claiming to address the hard problem, although some have interpreted them otherwise. A published interview with Koch gives a clear statement of the limitations on the theory’s ambitions.

Well, let’s first forget about the really difficult aspects, like subjective feelings, for they may not have a scientific solution. The subjective state of play, of pain, of pleasure, of seeing blue, of smelling a rose – there seems to be a huge jump between the materialistic level, of explaining molecules and neurons, and the subjective level. Let’s focus on things that are easier to study – like visual awareness. You’re now talking to me, but you’re not looking at me, you’re looking at the cappuccino, and so you are aware of it. You can say, `It’s a cup and there’s some liquid in it.’ If I give it to you, you’ll move your arm and you’ll take it – you’ll respond in a meaningful manner. That’s what I call awareness.” (“What is Consciousness”, Discover, November 1992, p. 96.)

The second example is an approach at the level of cognitive psychology. This is Baars’ global workspace theory of consciousness, presented in his book A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness. According to this theory, the contents of consciousness are contained in a global workspace, a central processor used to mediate communication between a host of specialized nonconscious processors. When these specialized processors need to broadcast information to the rest of the system, they do so by sending this information to the workspace, which acts as a kind of communal blackboard for the rest of the system, accessible to all the other processors.

Baars uses this model to address many aspects of human cognition, and to explain a number of contrasts between conscious and unconscious cognitive functioning. Ultimately, however, it is a theory of cognitive accessibility, explaining how it is that certain information contents are widely accessible within a system, as well as a theory of informational integration and reportability. The theory shows promise as a theory of awareness, the functional correlate of conscious experience, but an explanation of experience itself is not on offer.

One might suppose that according to this theory, the contents of experience are precisely the contents of the workspace. But even if this is so, nothing internal to the theory explains why the information within the global workspace is experienced. The best the theory can do is to say that the information is experienced because it is globally accessible. But now the question arises in a different form: why should global accessibility give rise to conscious experience? As always, this bridging question is unanswered.

Almost all work taking a cognitive or neuroscientific approach to consciousness in recent years could be subjected to a similar critique. The “Neural Darwinism” model of Edelman (1989), for instance, addresses questions about perceptual awareness and the self-concept, but says nothing about why there should also be experience. The “multiple drafts” model of Dennett (1991) is largely directed at explaining the reportability of certain mental contents. The “intermediate level” theory of Jackendoff (1988) provides an account of some computational processes that underlie consciousness, but Jackendoff stresses that the question of how these “project” into conscious experience remains mysterious.

Researchers using these methods are often inexplicit about their attitudes to the problem of conscious experience, although sometimes they take a clear stand. Even among those who are clear about it, attitudes differ widely. In placing this sort of work with respect to the problem of experience, a number of different strategies are available. It would be useful if these strategic choices were more often made explicit.

The first strategy is simply to explain something else. Some researchers are explicit that the problem of experience is too difficult for now, and perhaps even outside the domain of science altogether. These researchers instead choose to address one of the more tractable problems such as reportability or the self-concept. Although I have called these problems the “easy” problems, they are among the most interesting unsolved problems in cognitive science, so this work is certainly worthwhile. The worst that can be said of this choice is that in the context of research on consciousness it is relatively unambitious, and the work can sometimes be misinterpreted.

The second choice is to take a harder line and deny the phenomenon. (Variations on this approach are taken by Allport 1988, Dennett 1991, and Wilkes 1988.) According to this line, once we have explained the functions such as accessibility, reportability, and the like, there is no further phenomenon called “experience” to explain. Some explicitly deny the phenomenon, holding for example that what is not externally verifiable cannot be real. Others achieve the same effect by allowing that experience exists, but only if we equate “experience” with something like the capacity to discriminate and report. These approaches lead to a simpler theory, but are ultimately unsatisfactory. Experience is the most central and manifest aspect of our mental lives, and indeed is perhaps the key explanandum in the science of the mind. Because of this status as an explanandum, experience cannot be discarded like the vital spirit when a new theory comes along. Rather, it is the central fact that any theory of consciousness must explain. A theory that denies the phenomenon “solves” the problem by ducking the question.

In a third option, some researchers claim to be explaining experience in the full sense. These researchers (unlike those above) wish to take experience very seriously; they lay out their functional model or theory, and claim that it explains the full subjective quality of experience (e.g. Flohr 1992, Humphrey 1992). The relevant step in the explanation is usually passed over quickly, however, and usually ends up looking something like magic. After some details about information processing are given, experience suddenly enters the picture, but it is left obscure how these processes should suddenly give rise to experience. Perhaps it is simply taken for granted that it does, but then we have an incomplete explanation and a version of the fifth strategy below.

A fourth, more promising approach appeals to these methods to explain the structure of experience. For example, it is arguable that an account of the discriminations made by the visual system can account for the structural relations between different color experiences, as well as for the geometric structure of the visual field (see e.g., Clark 1992 and Hardin 1992). In general, certain facts about structures found in processing will correspond to and arguably explain facts about the structure of experience. This strategy is plausible but limited. At best, it takes the existence of experience for granted and accounts for some facts about its structure, providing a sort of nonreductive explanation of the structural aspects of experience (I will say more on this later). This is useful for many purposes, but it tells us nothing about why there should be experience in the first place.

A fifth and reasonable strategy is to isolate the substrate of experience. After all, almost everyone allows that experience arises one way or another from brain processes, and it makes sense to identify the sort of process from which it arises. Crick and Koch put their work forward as isolating the neural correlate of consciousness, for example, and Edelman (1989) and Jackendoff (1988) make related claims. Justification of these claims requires a careful theoretical analysis, especially as experience is not directly observable in experimental contexts, but when applied judiciously this strategy can shed indirect light on the problem of experience. Nevertheless, the strategy is clearly incomplete. For a satisfactory theory, we need to know more than which processes give rise to experience; we need an account of why and how. A full theory of consciousness must build an explanatory bridge.
5 The extra ingredient

We have seen that there are systematic reasons why the usual methods of cognitive science and neuroscience fail to account for conscious experience. These are simply the wrong sort of methods: nothing that they give to us can yield an explanation. To account for conscious experience, we need an extra ingredient in the explanation. This makes for a challenge to those who are serious about the hard problem of consciousness: What is your extra ingredient, and why should that account for conscious experience?

There is no shortage of extra ingredients to be had. Some propose an injection of chaos and nonlinear dynamics. Some think that the key lies in nonalgorithmic processing. Some appeal to future discoveries in neurophysiology. Some suppose that the key to the mystery will lie at the level of quantum mechanics. It is easy to see why all these suggestions are put forward. None of the old methods work, so the solution must lie with something new. Unfortunately, these suggestions all suffer from the same old problems.

Nonalgorithmic processing, for example, is put forward by Penrose (1989; 1994) because of the role it might play in the process of conscious mathematical insight. The arguments about mathematics are controversial, but even if they succeed and an account of nonalgorithmic processing in the human brain is given, it will still only be an account of the functions involved in mathematical reasoning and the like. For a nonalgorithmic process as much as an algorithmic process, the question is left unanswered: why should this process give rise to experience? In answering this question, there is no special role for nonalgorithmic processing.

The same goes for nonlinear and chaotic dynamics. These might provide a novel account of the dynamics of cognitive functioning, quite different from that given by standard methods in cognitive science. But from dynamics, one only gets more dynamics. The question about experience here is as mysterious as ever. The point is even clearer for new discoveries in neurophysiology. These new discoveries may help us make significant progress in understanding brain function, but for any neural process we isolate, the same question will always arise. It is difficult to imagine what a proponent of new neurophysiology expects to happen, over and above the explanation of further cognitive functions. It is not as if we will suddenly discover a phenomenal glow inside a neuron!

Perhaps the most popular “extra ingredient” of all is quantum mechanics (e.g. Hameroff 1994). The attractiveness of quantum theories of consciousness may stem from a Law of Minimization of Mystery: consciousness is mysterious and quantum mechanics is mysterious, so maybe the two mysteries have a common source. Nevertheless, quantum theories of consciousness suffer from the same difficulties as neural or computational theories. Quantum phenomena have some remarkable functional properties, such as nondeterminism and nonlocality. It is natural to speculate that these properties may play some role in the explanation of cognitive functions, such as random choice and the integration of information, and this hypothesis cannot be ruled out a priori. But when it comes to the explanation of experience, quantum processes are in the same boat as any other. The question of why these processes should give rise to experience is entirely unanswered.

(One special attraction of quantum theories is the fact that on some interpretations of quantum mechanics, consciousness plays an active role in “collapsing” the quantum wave function. Such interpretations are controversial, but in any case they offer no hope of explaining consciousness in terms of quantum processes. Rather, these theories assume the existence of consciousness, and use it in the explanation of quantum processes. At best, these theories tell us something about a physical role that consciousness may play. They tell us nothing about how it arises.)

At the end of the day, the same criticism applies to any purely physical account of consciousness. For any physical process we specify there will be an unanswered question: Why should this process give rise to experience? Given any such process, it is conceptually coherent that it could be instantiated in the absence of experience. It follows that no mere account of the physical process will tell us why experience arises. The emergence of experience goes beyond what can be derived from physical theory.

Purely physical explanation is well-suited to the explanation of physical structures, explaining macroscopic structures in terms of detailed microstructural constituents; and it provides a satisfying explanation of the performance of functions, accounting for these functions in terms of the physical mechanisms that perform them. This is because a physical account can entail the facts about structures and functions: once the internal details of the physical account are given, the structural and functional properties fall out as an automatic consequence. But the structure and dynamics of physical processes yield only more structure and dynamics, so structures and functions are all we can expect these processes to explain. The facts about experience cannot be an automatic consequence of any physical account, as it is conceptually coherent that any given process could exist without experience. Experience may arise from the physical, but it is not entailed by the physical.

The moral of all this is that you can’t explain conscious experience on the cheap. It is a remarkable fact that reductive methods – methods that explain a high-level phenomenon wholly in terms of more basic physical processes – work well in so many domains. In a sense, one can explain most biological and cognitive phenomena on the cheap, in that these phenomena are seen as automatic consequences of more fundamental processes. It would be wonderful if reductive methods could explain experience, too; I hoped for a long time that they might. Unfortunately, there are systematic reasons why these methods must fail. Reductive methods are successful in most domains because what needs explaining in those domains are structures and functions, and these are the kind of thing that a physical account can entail. When it comes to a problem over and above the explanation of structures and functions, these methods are impotent.

This might seem reminiscent of the vitalist claim that no physical account could explain life, but the cases are disanalogous. What drove vitalist skepticism was doubt about whether physical mechanisms could perform the many remarkable functions associated with life, such as complex adaptive behavior and reproduction. The conceptual claim that explanation of functions is what is needed was implicitly accepted, but lacking detailed knowledge of biochemical mechanisms, vitalists doubted whether any physical process could do the job and put forward the hypothesis of the vital spirit as an alternative explanation. Once it turned out that physical processes could perform the relevant functions, vitalist doubts melted away.

With experience, on the other hand, physical explanation of the functions is not in question. The key is instead the conceptual point that the explanation of functions does not suffice for the explanation of experience. This basic conceptual point is not something that further neuroscientific investigation will affect. In a similar way, experience is disanalogous to the élan vital. The vital spirit was put forward as an explanatory posit, in order to explain the relevant functions, and could therefore be discarded when those functions were explained without it. Experience is not an explanatory posit but an explanandum in its own right, and so is not a candidate for this sort of elimination.

It is tempting to note that all sorts of puzzling phenomena have eventually turned out to be explainable in physical terms. But each of these were problems about the observable behavior of physical objects, coming down to problems in the explanation of structures and functions. Because of this, these phenomena have always been the kind of thing that a physical account might explain, even if at some points there have been good reasons to suspect that no such explanation would be forthcoming. The tempting induction from these cases fails in the case of consciousness, which is not a problem about physical structures and functions. The problem of consciousness is puzzling in an entirely different way. An analysis of the problem shows us that conscious experience is just not the kind of thing that a wholly reductive account could succeed in explaining.
6 Nonreductive explanation

At this point some are tempted to give up, holding that we will never have a theory of conscious experience. McGinn (1989), for example, argues that the problem is too hard for our limited minds; we are “cognitively closed” with respect to the phenomenon. Others have argued that conscious experience lies outside the domain of scientific theory altogether.

I think this pessimism is premature. This is not the place to give up; it is the place where things get interesting. When simple methods of explanation are ruled out, we need to investigate the alternatives. Given that reductive explanation fails, nonreductive explanation is the natural choice.

Although a remarkable number of phenomena have turned out to be explicable wholly in terms of entities simpler than themselves, this is not universal. In physics, it occasionally happens that an entity has to be taken as fundamental. Fundamental entities are not explained in terms of anything simpler. Instead, one takes them as basic, and gives a theory of how they relate to everything else in the world. For example, in the nineteenth century it turned out that electromagnetic processes could not be explained in terms of the wholly mechanical processes that previous physical theories appealed to, so Maxwell and others introduced electromagnetic charge and electromagnetic forces as new fundamental components of a physical theory. To explain electromagnetism, the ontology of physics had to be expanded. New basic properties and basic laws were needed to give a satisfactory account of the phenomena.

Other features that physical theory takes as fundamental include mass and space-time. No attempt is made to explain these features in terms of anything simpler. But this does not rule out the possibility of a theory of mass or of space-time. There is an intricate theory of how these features interrelate, and of the basic laws they enter into. These basic principles are used to explain many familiar phenomena concerning mass, space, and time at a higher level.

I suggest that a theory of consciousness should take experience as fundamental. We know that a theory of consciousness requires the addition of something fundamental to our ontology, as everything in physical theory is compatible with the absence of consciousness. We might add some entirely new nonphysical feature, from which experience can be derived, but it is hard to see what such a feature would be like. More likely, we will take experience itself as a fundamental feature of the world, alongside mass, charge, and space-time. If we take experience as fundamental, then we can go about the business of constructing a theory of experience.

Where there is a fundamental property, there are fundamental laws. A nonreductive theory of experience will add new principles to the furniture of the basic laws of nature. These basic principles will ultimately carry the explanatory burden in a theory of consciousness. Just as we explain familiar high-level phenomena involving mass in terms of more basic principles involving mass and other entities, we might explain familiar phenomena involving experience in terms of more basic principles involving experience and other entities.

In particular, a nonreductive theory of experience will specify basic principles telling us how experience depends on physical features of the world. These psychophysical principles will not interfere with physical laws, as it seems that physical laws already form a closed system. Rather, they will be a supplement to a physical theory. A physical theory gives a theory of physical processes, and a psychophysical theory tells us how those processes give rise to experience. We know that experience depends on physical processes, but we also know that this dependence cannot be derived from physical laws alone. The new basic principles postulated by a nonreductive theory give us the extra ingredient that we need to build an explanatory bridge.

Of course, by taking experience as fundamental, there is a sense in which this approach does not tell us why there is experience in the first place. But this is the same for any fundamental theory. Nothing in physics tells us why there is matter in the first place, but we do not count this against theories of matter. Certain features of the world need to be taken as fundamental by any scientific theory. A theory of matter can still explain all sorts of facts about matter, by showing how they are consequences of the basic laws. The same goes for a theory of experience.

This position qualifies as a variety of dualism, as it postulates basic properties over and above the properties invoked by physics. But it is an innocent version of dualism, entirely compatible with the scientific view of the world. Nothing in this approach contradicts anything in physical theory; we simply need to add further bridging principles to explain how experience arises from physical processes. There is nothing particularly spiritual or mystical about this theory – its overall shape is like that of a physical theory, with a few fundamental entities connected by fundamental laws. It expands the ontology slightly, to be sure, but Maxwell did the same thing. Indeed, the overall structure of this position is entirely naturalistic, allowing that ultimately the universe comes down to a network of basic entities obeying simple laws, and allowing that there may ultimately be a theory of consciousness cast in terms of such laws. If the position is to have a name, a good choice might be naturalistic dualism.

If this view is right, then in some ways a theory of consciousness will have more in common with a theory in physics than a theory in biology. Biological theories involve no principles that are fundamental in this way, so biological theory has a certain complexity and messiness to it; but theories in physics, insofar as they deal with fundamental principles, aspire to simplicity and elegance. The fundamental laws of nature are part of the basic furniture of the world, and physical theories are telling us that this basic furniture is remarkably simple. If a theory of consciousness also involves fundamental principles, then we should expect the same. The principles of simplicity, elegance, and even beauty that drive physicists’ search for a fundamental theory will also apply to a theory of consciousness.

(A technical note: Some philosophers argue that even though there is a conceptual gap between physical processes and experience, there need be no metaphysical gap, so that experience might in a certain sense still be physical (e.g. Hill 1991; Levine 1983; Loar 1990). Usually this line of argument is supported by an appeal to the notion of a posteriori necessity (Kripke 1980). I think that this position rests on a misunderstanding of a posteriori necessity, however, or else requires an entirely new sort of necessity that we have no reason to believe in; see Chalmers 1996 (also Jackson 1994 and Lewis 1994) for details. In any case, this position still concedes an explanatory gap between physical processes and experience. For example, the principles connecting the physical and the experiential will not be derivable from the laws of physics, so such principles must be taken as explanatorily fundamental. So even on this sort of view, the explanatory structure of a theory of consciousness will be much as I have described.)
7 Outline of a theory of consciousness

It is not too soon to begin work on a theory. We are already in a position to understand certain key facts about the relationship between physical processes and experience, and about the regularities that connect them. Once reductive explanation is set aside, we can lay those facts on the table so that they can play their proper role as the initial pieces in a nonreductive theory of consciousness, and as constraints on the basic laws that constitute an ultimate theory.

There is an obvious problem that plagues the development of a theory of consciousness, and that is the paucity of objective data. Conscious experience is not directly observable in an experimental context, so we cannot generate data about the relationship between physical processes and experience at will. Nevertheless, we all have access to a rich source of data in our own case. Many important regularities between experience and processing can be inferred from considerations about one’s own experience. There are also good indirect sources of data from observable cases, as when one relies on the verbal report of a subject as an indication of experience. These methods have their limitations, but we have more than enough data to get a theory off the ground.

Philosophical analysis is also useful in getting value for money out of the data we have. This sort of analysis can yield a number of principles relating consciousness and cognition, thereby strongly constraining the shape of an ultimate theory. The method of thought-experimentation can also yield significant rewards, as we will see. Finally, the fact that we are searching for a fundamental theory means that we can appeal to such nonempirical constraints as simplicity, homogeneity, and the like in developing a theory. We must seek to systematize the information we have, to extend it as far as possible by careful analysis, and then make the inference to the simplest possible theory that explains the data while remaining a plausible candidate to be part of the fundamental furniture of the world.

Such theories will always retain an element of speculation that is not present in other scientific theories, because of the impossibility of conclusive intersubjective experimental tests. Still, we can certainly construct theories that are compatible with the data that we have, and evaluate them in comparison to each other. Even in the absence of intersubjective observation, there are numerous criteria available for the evaluation of such theories: simplicity, internal coherence, coherence with theories in other domains, the ability to reproduce the properties of experience that are familiar from our own case, and even an overall fit with the dictates of common sense. Perhaps there will be significant indeterminacies remaining even when all these constraints are applied, but we can at least develop plausible candidates. Only when candidate theories have been developed will we be able to evaluate them.

A nonreductive theory of consciousness will consist in a number of psychophysical principles, principles connecting the properties of physical processes to the properties of experience. We can think of these principles as encapsulating the way in which experience arises from the physical. Ultimately, these principles should tell us what sort of physical systems will have associated experiences, and for the systems that do, they should tell us what sort of physical properties are relevant to the emergence of experience, and just what sort of experience we should expect any given physical system to yield. This is a tall order, but there is no reason why we should not get started.

In what follows, I present my own candidates for the psychophysical principles that might go into a theory of consciousness. The first two of these are nonbasic principles – systematic connections between processing and experience at a relatively high level. These principles can play a significant role in developing and constraining a theory of consciousness, but they are not cast at a sufficiently fundamental level to qualify as truly basic laws. The final principle is my candidate for a basic principle that might form the cornerstone of a fundamental theory of consciousness. This final principle is particularly speculative, but it is the kind of speculation that is required if we are ever to have a satisfying theory of consciousness. I can present these principles only briefly here; I argue for them at much greater length in Chalmers (1996).

1. The principle of structural coherence. This is a principle of coherence between the structure of consciousness and the structure of awareness. Recall that “awareness” was used earlier to refer to the various functional phenomena that are associated with consciousness. I am now using it to refer to a somewhat more specific process in the cognitive underpinnings of experience. In particular, the contents of awareness are to be understood as those information contents that are accessible to central systems, and brought to bear in a widespread way in the control of behavior. Briefly put, we can think of awareness as direct availability for global control. To a first approximation, the contents of awareness are the contents that are directly accessible and potentially reportable, at least in a language-using system.

Awareness is a purely functional notion, but it is nevertheless intimately linked to conscious experience. In familiar cases, wherever we find consciousness, we find awareness. Wherever there is conscious experience, there is some corresponding information in the cognitive system that is available in the control of behavior, and available for verbal report. Conversely, it seems that whenever information is available for report and for global control, there is a corresponding conscious experience. Thus, there is a direct correspondence between consciousness and awareness.

The correspondence can be taken further. It is a central fact about experience that it has a complex structure. The visual field has a complex geometry, for instance. There are also relations of similarity and difference between experiences, and relations in such things as relative intensity. Every subject’s experience can be at least partly characterized and decomposed in terms of these structural properties: similarity and difference relations, perceived location, relative intensity, geometric structure, and so on. It is also a central fact that to each of these structural features, there is a corresponding feature in the information-processing structure of awareness.

Take color sensations as an example. For every distinction between color experiences, there is a corresponding distinction in processing. The different phenomenal colors that we experience form a complex three-dimensional space, varying in hue, saturation, and intensity. The properties of this space can be recovered from information-processing considerations: examination of the visual systems shows that waveforms of light are discriminated and analyzed along three different axes, and it is this three-dimensional information that is relevant to later processing. The three-dimensional structure of phenomenal color space therefore corresponds directly to the three dimensional structure of visual awareness. This is precisely what we would expect. After all, every color distinction corresponds to some reportable information, and therefore to a distinction that is represented in the structure of processing.

In a more straightforward way, the geometric structure of the visual field is directly reflected in a structure that can be recovered from visual processing. Every geometric relation corresponds to something that can be reported and is therefore cognitively represented. If we were given only the story about information-processing in an agent’s visual and cognitive system, we could not directly observe that agent’s visual experiences, but we could nevertheless infer those experiences’ structural properties.

In general, any information that is consciously experienced will also be cognitively represented. The fine-grained structure of the visual field will correspond to some fine-grained structure in visual processing. The same goes for experiences in other modalities, and even for nonsensory experiences. Internal mental images have geometric properties that are represented in processing. Even emotions have structural properties, such as relative intensity, that correspond directly to a structural property of processing; where there is greater intensity, we find a greater effect on later processes. In general, precisely because the structural properties of experience are accessible and reportable, those properties will be directly represented in the structure of awareness.

It is this isomorphism between the structures of consciousness and awareness that constitutes the principle of structural coherence. This principle reflects the central fact that even though cognitive processes do not conceptually entail facts about conscious experience, consciousness and cognition do not float free of one another but cohere in an intimate way.

This principle has its limits. It allows us to recover structural properties of experience from information-processing properties, but not all properties of experience are structural properties. There are properties of experience, such as the intrinsic nature of a sensation of red, that cannot be fully captured in a structural description. The very intelligibility of inverted spectrum scenarios, where experiences of red and green are inverted but all structural properties remain the same, show that structural properties constrain experience without exhausting it. Nevertheless, the very fact that we feel compelled to leave structural properties unaltered when we imagine experiences inverted between functionally identical systems shows how central the principle of structural coherence is to our conception of our mental lives. It is not a logically necessary principle, as after all we can imagine all the information processing occurring without any experience at all, but it is nevertheless a strong and familiar constraint on the psychophysical connection.

The principle of structural coherence allows for a very useful kind of indirect explanation of experience in terms of physical processes. For example, we can use facts about neural processing of visual information to indirectly explain the structure of color space. The facts about neural processing can entail and explain the structure of awareness; if we take the coherence principle for granted, the structure of experience will also be explained. Empirical investigation might even lead us to better understand the structure of awareness within a bat, shedding indirect light on Nagel’s vexing question of what it is like to be a bat. This principle provides a natural interpretation of much existing work on the explanation of consciousness (e.g. Clark 1992 and Hardin 1992 on colors, and Akins 1993 on bats), although it is often appealed to inexplicitly. It is so familiar that it is taken for granted by almost everybody, and is a central plank in the cognitive explanation of consciousness.

The coherence between consciousness and awareness also allows a natural interpretation of work in neuroscience directed at isolating the substrate (or the neural correlate) of consciousness. Various specific hypotheses have been put forward. For example, Crick and Koch (1990) suggest that 40-Hz oscillations may be the neural correlate of consciousness, whereas Libet (1993) suggests that temporally-extended neural activity is central. If we accept the principle of coherence, the most direct physical correlate of consciousness is awareness: the process whereby information is made directly available for global control. The different specific hypotheses can be interpreted as empirical suggestions about how awareness might be achieved. For example, Crick and Koch suggest that 40-Hz oscillations are the gateway by which information is integrated into working memory and thereby made available to later processes. Similarly, it is natural to suppose that Libet’s temporally extended activity is relevant precisely because only that sort of activity achieves global availability. The same applies to other suggested correlates such as the “global workspace” of Baars (1988), the “high-quality representations” of Farah (1994), and the “selector inputs to action systems” of Shallice (1972). All these can be seen as hypotheses about the mechanisms of awareness: the mechanisms that perform the function of making information directly available for global control.

Given the coherence between consciousness and awareness, it follows that a mechanism of awareness will itself be a correlate of conscious experience. The question of just which mechanisms in the brain govern global availability is an empirical one; perhaps there are many such mechanisms. But if we accept the coherence principle, we have reason to believe that the processes that explain awareness will at the same time be part of the basis of consciousness.

2. The principle of organizational invariance. This principle states that any two systems with the same fine-grained functional organization will have qualitatively identical experiences. If the causal patterns of neural organization were duplicated in silicon, for example, with a silicon chip for every neuron and the same patterns of interaction, then the same experiences would arise. According to this principle, what matters for the emergence of experience is not the specific physical makeup of a system, but the abstract pattern of causal interaction between its components. This principle is controversial, of course. Some (e.g. Searle 1980) have thought that consciousness is tied to a specific biology, so that a silicon isomorph of a human need not be conscious. I believe that the principle can be given significant support by the analysis of thought-experiments, however.

Very briefly: suppose (for the purposes of a reductio ad absurdum) that the principle is false, and that there could be two functionally isomorphic systems with different experiences. Perhaps only one of the systems is conscious, or perhaps both are conscious but they have different experiences. For the purposes of illustration, let us say that one system is made of neurons and the other of silicon, and that one experiences red where the other experiences blue. The two systems have the same organization, so we can imagine gradually transforming one into the other, perhaps replacing neurons one at a time by silicon chips with the same local function. We thus gain a spectrum of intermediate cases, each with the same organization, but with slightly different physical makeup and slightly different experiences. Along this spectrum, there must be two systems A and B between which we replace less than one tenth of the system, but whose experiences differ. These two systems are physically identical, except that a small neural circuit in A has been replaced by a silicon circuit in B.

The key step in the thought-experiment is to take the relevant neural circuit in A, and install alongside it a causally isomorphic silicon circuit, with a switch between the two. What happens when we flip the switch? By hypothesis, the system’s conscious experiences will change; from red to blue, say, for the purposes of illustration. This follows from the fact that the system after the change is essentially a version of B, whereas before the change it is just A.

But given the assumptions, there is no way for the system to notice the changes! Its causal organization stays constant, so that all of its functional states and behavioral dispositions stay fixed. As far as the system is concerned, nothing unusual has happened. There is no room for the thought, “Hmm! Something strange just happened!”. In general, the structure of any such thought must be reflected in processing, but the structure of processing remains constant here. If there were to be such a thought it must float entirely free of the system and would be utterly impotent to affect later processing. (If it affected later processing, the systems would be functionally distinct, contrary to hypothesis). We might even flip the switch a number of times, so that experiences of red and blue dance back and forth before the system’s “inner eye”. According to hypothesis, the system can never notice these “dancing qualia”.

This I take to be a reductio of the original assumption. It is a central fact about experience, very familiar from our own case, that whenever experiences change significantly and we are paying attention, we can notice the change; if this were not to be the case, we would be led to the skeptical possibility that our experiences are dancing before our eyes all the time. This hypothesis has the same status as the possibility that the world was created five minutes ago: perhaps it is logically coherent, but it is not plausible. Given the extremely plausible assumption that changes in experience correspond to changes in processing, we are led to the conclusion that the original hypothesis is impossible, and that any two functionally isomorphic systems must have the same sort of experiences. To put it in technical terms, the philosophical hypotheses of “absent qualia” and “inverted qualia”, while logically possible, are empirically and nomologically impossible.

(Some may worry that a silicon isomorph of a neural system might be impossible for technical reasons. That question is open. The invariance principle says only that if an isomorph is possible, then it will have the same sort of conscious experience.)

There is more to be said here, but this gives the basic flavor. Once again, this thought experiment draws on familiar facts about the coherence between consciousness and cognitive processing to yield a strong conclusion about the relation between physical structure and experience. If the argument goes through, we know that the only physical properties directly relevant to the emergence of experience are organizational properties. This acts as a further strong constraint on a theory of consciousness.

3. The double-aspect theory of information. The two preceding principles have been nonbasic principles. They involve high-level notions such as “awareness” and “organization”, and therefore lie at the wrong level to constitute the fundamental laws in a theory of consciousness. Nevertheless, they act as strong constraints. What is further needed are basic principles that fit these constraints and that might ultimately explain them.

The basic principle that I suggest centrally involves the notion of information. I understand information in more or less the sense of Shannon (1948). Where there is information, there are information states embedded in an information space. An information space has a basic structure of difference relations between its elements, characterizing the ways in which different elements in a space are similar or different, possibly in complex ways. An information space is an abstract object, but following Shannon we can see information as physically embodied when there is a space of distinct physical states, the differences between which can be transmitted down some causal pathway. The states that are transmitted can be seen as themselves constituting an information space. To borrow a phrase from Bateson (1972), physical information is a difference that makes a difference.

The double-aspect principle stems from the observation that there is a direct isomorphism between certain physically embodied information spaces and certain phenomenal (or experiential) information spaces. From the same sort of observations that went into the principle of structural coherence, we can note that the differences between phenomenal states have a structure that corresponds directly to the differences embedded in physical processes; in particular, to those differences that make a difference down certain causal pathways implicated in global availability and control. That is, we can find the same abstract information space embedded in physical processing and in conscious experience.

This leads to a natural hypothesis: that information (or at least some information) has two basic aspects, a physical aspect and a phenomenal aspect. This has the status of a basic principle that might underlie and explain the emergence of experience from the physical. Experience arises by virtue of its status as one aspect of information, when the other aspect is found embodied in physical processing.

This principle is lent support by a number of considerations, which I can only outline briefly here. First, consideration of the sort of physical changes that correspond to changes in conscious experience suggests that such changes are always relevant by virtue of their role in constituting informational changes – differences within an abstract space of states that are divided up precisely according to their causal differences along certain causal pathways. Second, if the principle of organizational invariance is to hold, then we need to find some fundamental organizational property for experience to be linked to, and information is an organizational property par excellence. Third, this principle offers some hope of explaining the principle of structural coherence in terms of the structure present within information spaces. Fourth, analysis of the cognitive explanation of our judgments and claims about conscious experience – judgments that are functionally explainable but nevertheless deeply tied to experience itself – suggests that explanation centrally involves the information states embedded in cognitive processing. It follows that a theory based on information allows a deep coherence between the explanation of experience and the explanation of our judgments and claims about it.

Wheeler (1990) has suggested that information is fundamental to the physics of the universe. According to this “it from bit” doctrine, the laws of physics can be cast in terms of information, postulating different states that give rise to different effects without actually saying what those states are. It is only their position in an information space that counts. If so, then information is a natural candidate to also play a role in a fundamental theory of consciousness. We are led to a conception of the world on which information is truly fundamental, and on which it has two basic aspects, corresponding to the physical and the phenomenal features of the world.

Of course, the double-aspect principle is extremely speculative and is also underdetermined, leaving a number of key questions unanswered. An obvious question is whether all information has a phenomenal aspect. One possibility is that we need a further constraint on the fundamental theory, indicating just what sort of information has a phenomenal aspect. The other possibility is that there is no such constraint. If not, then experience is much more widespread than we might have believed, as information is everywhere. This is counterintuitive at first, but on reflection I think the position gains a certain plausibility and elegance. Where there is simple information processing, there is simple experience, and where there is complex information processing, there is complex experience. A mouse has a simpler information-processing structure than a human, and has correspondingly simpler experience; perhaps a thermostat, a maximally simple information processing structure, might have maximally simple experience? Indeed, if experience is truly a fundamental property, it would be surprising for it to arise only every now and then; most fundamental properties are more evenly spread. In any case, this is very much an open question, but I believe that the position is not as implausible as it is often thought to be.

Once a fundamental link between information and experience is on the table, the door is opened to some grander metaphysical speculation concerning the nature of the world. For example, it is often noted that physics characterizes its basic entities only extrinsically, in terms of their relations to other entities, which are themselves characterized extrinsically, and so on. The intrinsic nature of physical entities is left aside. Some argue that no such intrinsic properties exist, but then one is left with a world that is pure causal flux (a pure flow of information) with no properties for the causation to relate. If one allows that intrinsic properties exist, a natural speculation given the above is that the intrinsic properties of the physical – the properties that causation ultimately relates – are themselves phenomenal properties. We might say that phenomenal properties are the internal aspect of information. This could answer a concern about the causal relevance of experience – a natural worry, given a picture on which the physical domain is causally closed, and on which experience is supplementary to the physical. The informational view allows us to understand how experience might have a subtle kind of causal relevance in virtue of its status as the intrinsic nature of the physical. This metaphysical speculation is probably best ignored for the purposes of developing a scientific theory, but in addressing some philosophical issues it is quite suggestive.
8 Conclusion

The theory I have presented is speculative, but it is a candidate theory. I suspect that the principles of structural coherence and organizational invariance will be planks in any satisfactory theory of consciousness; the status of the double-aspect theory of information is less certain. Indeed, right now it is more of an idea than a theory. To have any hope of eventual explanatory success, it will have to be specified more fully and fleshed out into a more powerful form. Still, reflection on just what is plausible and implausible about it, on where it works and where it fails, can only lead to a better theory.

Most existing theories of consciousness either deny the phenomenon, explain something else, or elevate the problem to an eternal mystery. I hope to have shown that it is possible to make progress on the problem even while taking it seriously. To make further progress, we will need further investigation, more refined theories, and more careful analysis. The hard problem is a hard problem, but there is no reason to believe that it will remain permanently unsolved.[*]

*[[The arguments in this paper are presented in greater depth in my book The Conscious Mind (Oxford University Press, 1996). Thanks to Francis Crick, Peggy DesAutels, Matthew Elton, Liane Gabora, Christof Koch, Paul Rhodes, Gregg Rosenberg, and Sharon Wahl for their comments.]]
Further Reading

The problems of consciousness have been widely discussed in the recent philosophical literature. For some conceptual clarification of the various problems of consciousness, see Block 1995, Nelkin 1993, and Tye 1995. Those who have stressed the difficulties of explaining experience in physical terms include Hodgson 1988, Jackson 1982, Levine 1983, Lockwood 1989, McGinn 1989, Nagel 1974, Seager 1991, Searle 1991, Strawson 1994, and Velmans 1991, among others. Those who take a reductive approach include Churchland 1995, Clark 1992, Dennett 1991, Dretske 1995, Kirk 1994, Rosenthal 1996, and Tye 1995. There have not been many attempts to build detailed nonreductive theories in the literature, but see Hodgson 1988 and Lockwood 1989 for some thoughts in that direction. Two excellent collections of recent articles on consciousness are Block, Flanagan, and Güzeldere 1996 and Metzinger 1995.
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No need to comment but feel free.

By Epictetus

Chapter 1

Of the things which are in our Power, and not in our Power

Of all the faculties, you will find not one which is capable of contemplating itself; and, consequently, not capable either of approving or disapproving. How far does the grammatic art possess the contemplating power? As far as forming a judgement about what is written and spoken. And how far music? As far as judging about melody. Does either of them then contemplate itself? By no means. But when you must write something to your friend, grammar will tell you what words you must write; but whether you should write or not, grammar will not tell you. And so it is with music as to musical sounds; but whether you should sing at the present time and play on the lute, or do neither, music will not tell you. What faculty then will tell you? That which contemplates both itself and all other things. And what is this faculty? The rational faculty; for this is the only faculty that we have received which examines itself, what it is, and what power it has, and what is the value of this gift, and examines all other faculties: for what else is there which tells us that golden things are beautiful, for they do not say so themselves? Evidently it is the faculty which is capable of judging of appearances. What else judges of music, grammar, and other faculties, proves their uses and points out the occasions for using them? Nothing else.

As then it was fit to be so, that which is best of all and supreme over all is the only thing which the gods have placed in our power, the right use of appearances; but all other things they have not placed in our power. Was it because they did not choose? I indeed think that, if they had been able, they would have put these other things also in our power, but they certainly could not. For as we exist on the earth, and are bound to such a body and to such companions, how was it possible for us not to be hindered as to these things by externals?

But what says Zeus? “Epictetus, if it were possible, I would have made both your little body and your little property free and not exposed to hindrance. But now be not ignorant of this: this body is not yours, but it is clay finely tempered. And since I was not able to do for you what I have mentioned, I have given you a small portion of us, this faculty of pursuing an object and avoiding it, and the faculty of desire and aversion, and, in a word, the faculty of using the appearances of things; and if you will take care of this faculty and consider it your only possession, you will never be hindered, never meet with impediments; you will not lament, you will not blame, you will not flatter any person.”

“Well, do these seem to you small matters?” I hope not. “Be content with them then and pray to the gods.” But now when it is in our power to look after one thing, and to attach ourselves to it, we prefer to look after many things, and to be bound to many things, to the body and to property, and to brother and to friend, and to child and to slave. Since, then, we are bound to many things, we are depressed by them and dragged down. For this reason, when the weather is not fit for sailing, we sit down and torment ourselves, and continually look out to see what wind is blowing. “It is north.” What is that to us? “When will the west wind blow?” When it shall choose, my good man, or when it shall please AEolus; for God has not made you the manager of the winds, but AEolus. What then? We must make the best use that we can of the things which are in our power, and use the rest according to their nature. What is their nature then? As God may please.

“Must I, then, alone have my head cut off?” What, would you have all men lose their heads that you may be consoled? Will you not stretch out your neck as Lateranus did at Rome when Nero ordered him to be beheaded? For when he had stretched out his neck, and received a feeble blow, which made him draw it in for a moment, he stretched it out again. And a little before, when he was visited by Epaphroditus, Nero’s freedman, who asked him about the cause of offense which he had given, he said, “If I choose to tell anything, I will tell your master.”

What then should a man have in readiness in such circumstances? What else than “What is mine, and what is not mine; and permitted to me, and what is not permitted to me.” I must die. Must I then die lamenting? I must be put in chains. Must I then also lament? I must go into exile. Does any man then hinder me from going with smiles and cheerfulness and contentment? “Tell me the secret which you possess.” I will not, for this is in my power. “But I will put you in chains.” Man, what are you talking about? Me in chains? You may fetter my leg, but my will not even Zeus himself can overpower. “I will throw you into prison.” My poor body, you mean. “I will cut your head off.” When, then, have I told you that my head alone cannot be cut off? These are the things which philosophers should meditate on, which they should write daily, in which they should exercise themselves.

Thrasea used to say, “I would rather be killed to-day than banished to-morrow.” What, then, did Rufus say to him? “If you choose death as the heavier misfortune, how great is the folly of your choice? But if, as the lighter, who has given you the choice? Will you not study to be content with that which has been given to you?”

What, then, did Agrippinus say? He said, “I am not a hindrance to myself.” When it was reported to him that his trial was going on in the Senate, he said, “I hope it may turn out well; but it is the fifth hour of the day”- this was the time when he was used to exercise himself and then take the cold bath- “let us go and take our exercise.” After he had taken his exercise, one comes and tells him, “You have been condemned.” “To banishment,” he replies, “or to death?” “To banishment.” “What about my property?” “It is not taken from you.” “Let us go to Aricia then,” he said, “and dine.”

This it is to have studied what a man ought to study; to have made desire, aversion, free from hindrance, and free from all that a man would avoid. I must die. If now, I am ready to die. If, after a short time, I now dine because it is the dinner-hour; after this I will then die. How? Like a man who gives up what belongs to another.

Chapter 2

How a Man on every occasion can maintain his Proper Character

To the rational animal only is the irrational intolerable; but that which is rational is tolerable. Blows are not naturally intolerable. “How is that?” See how the Lacedaemonians endure whipping when they have learned that whipping is consistent with reason. “To hang yourself is not intolerable.” When, then, you have the opinion that it is rational, you go and hang yourself. In short, if we observe, we shall find that the animal man is pained by nothing so much as by that which is irrational; and, on the contrary, attracted to nothing so much as to that which is rational.

But the rational and the irrational appear such in a different way to different persons, just as the good and the bad, the profitable and the unprofitable. For this reason, particularly, we need discipline, in order to learn how to adapt the preconception of the rational and the irrational to the several things conformably to nature. But in order to determine the rational and the irrational, we use not only the of external things, but we consider also what is appropriate to each person. For to one man it is consistent with reason to hold a chamber pot for another, and to look to this only, that if he does not hold it, he will receive stripes, and he will not receive his food: but if he shall hold the pot, he will not suffer anything hard or disagreeable. But to another man not only does the holding of a chamber pot appear intolerable for himself, but intolerable also for him to allow another to do this office for him. If, then, you ask me whether you should hold the chamber pot or not, I shall say to you that the receiving of food is worth more than the not receiving of it, and the being scourged is a greater indignity than not being scourged; so that if you measure your interests by these things, go and hold the chamber pot. “But this,” you say, “would not be worthy of me.” Well, then, it is you who must introduce this consideration into the inquiry, not I; for it is you who know yourself, how much you are worth to yourself, and at what price you sell yourself; for men sell themselves at various prices.

For this reason, when Florus was deliberating whether he should go down to Nero’s spectacles and also perform in them himself, Agrippinus said to him, “Go down”: and when Florus asked Agrippinus, “Why do not you go down?” Agrippinus replied, “Because I do not even deliberate about the matter.” For he who has once brought himself to deliberate about such matters, and to calculate the value of external things, comes very near to those who have forgotten their own character. For why do you ask me the question, whether death is preferable or life? I say “life.” “Pain or pleasure?” I say “pleasure.” But if I do not take a part in the tragic acting, I shall have my head struck off. Go then and take a part, but I will not. “Why?” Because you consider yourself to be only one thread of those which are in the tunic. Well then it was fitting for you to take care how you should be like the rest of men, just as the thread has no design to be anything superior to the other threads. But I wish to be purple, that small part which is bright, and makes all the rest appear graceful and beautiful. Why then do you tell me to make myself like the many? and if I do, how shall I still be purple?

Priscus Helvidius also saw this, and acted conformably. For when Vespasian sent and commanded him not to go into the senate, he replied, “It is in your power not to allow me to be a member of the senate, but so long as I am, I must go in.” “Well, go in then,” says the emperor, “but say nothing.” “Do not ask my opinion, and I will be silent.” “But I must ask your opinion.” “And I must say what I think right.” “But if you do, I shall put you to death.” “When then did I tell you that I am immortal? You will do your part, and I will do mine: it is your part to kill; it is mine to die, but not in fear: yours to banish me; mine to depart without sorrow.”

What good then did Priscus do, who was only a single person? And what good does the purple do for the toga? Why, what else than this, that it is conspicuous in the toga as purple, and is displayed also as a fine example to all other things? But in such circumstances another would have replied to Caesar who forbade him to enter the senate, “I thank you for sparing me.” But such a man Vespasian would not even have forbidden to enter the senate, for he knew that he would either sit there like an earthen vessel, or, if he spoke, he would say what Caesar wished, and add even more.

In this way an athlete also acted who was in danger of dying unless his private parts were amputated. His brother came to the athlete, who was a philosopher, and said, “Come, brother, what are you going to do? Shall we amputate this member and return to the gymnasium?” But the athlete persisted in his resolution and died. When some one asked Epictetus how he did this, as an athlete or a philosopher, “As a man,” Epictetus replied, “and a man who had been proclaimed among the athletes at the Olympic games and had contended in them, a man who had been familiar with such a place, and not merely anointed in Baton’s school. Another would have allowed even his head to be cut off, if he could have lived without it. Such is that regard to character which is so strong in those who have been accustomed to introduce it of themselves and conjoined with other things into their deliberations.”

“Come, then, Epictetus, shave yourself.” “If I am a philosopher,” I answer, “I will not shave myself.” “But I will take off your head?” If that will do you any good, take it off.

Some person asked, “How then shall every man among us perceive what is suitable to his character?” How, he replied, does the bull alone, when the lion has attacked, discover his own powers and put himself forward in defense of the whole herd? It is plain that with the powers the perception of having them is immediately conjoined; and, therefore, whoever of us has such powers will not be ignorant of them. Now a bull is not made suddenly, nor a brave man; but we must discipline ourselves in the winter for the summer campaign, and not rashly run upon that which does not concern us.

Only consider at what price you sell your own will; if for no other reason, at least for this, that you sell it not for a small sum. But that which is great and superior perhaps belongs to Socrates and such as are like him. “Why then, if we are naturally such, are not a very great number of us like him?” Is it true then that all horses become swift, that all dogs are skilled in tracking footprints? “What, then, since I am naturally dull, shall I, for this reason, take no pains?” I hope not. Epictetus is not superior to Socrates; but if he is not inferior, this is enough for me; for I shall never be a Milo, and yet I do not neglect my body; nor shall I be a Croesus, and yet I do not neglect my property; nor, in a word, do we neglect looking after anything because we despair of reaching the highest degree.

Chapter 3

How a man should proceed from the principle of God being the father of all men to the rest

If a man should be able to assent to this doctrine as he ought, that we are all sprung from God in an especial manner, and that God is the father both of men and of gods, I suppose that he would never have any ignoble or mean thoughts about himself. But if Caesar should adopt you, no one could endure your arrogance; and if you know that you are the son of Zeus, will you not be elated? Yet we do not so; but since these two things are mingled in the generation of man, body in common with the animals, and reason and intelligence in common with the gods, many incline to this kinship, which is miserable and mortal; and some few to that which is divine and happy. Since then it is of necessity that every man uses everything according to the opinion which he has about it, those, the few, who think that they are formed for fidelity and modesty and a sure use of appearances have no mean or ignoble thoughts about themselves; but with the many it is quite the contrary. For they say, “What am I? A poor, miserable man, with my wretched bit of flesh.” Wretched. Indeed; but you possess something better than your “bit of flesh.” Why then do you neglect that which is better, and why do you attach yourself to this?

Through this kinship with the flesh, some of us inclining to it become like wolves, faithless and treacherous and mischievous: some become like lions, savage and untamed; but the greater part of us become foxes and other worse animals. For what else is a slanderer and a malignant man than a fox, or some other more wretched and meaner animal? See, then, and take care that you do not become some one of these miserable things.

Chapter 4

Of progress or improvement

He who is making progress, having learned from philosophers that desire means the desire of good things, and aversion means aversion from bad things; having learned too that happiness and tranquillity are not attainable by man otherwise than by not failing to obtain what he desires, and not falling into that which he would avoid; such a man takes from himself desire altogether and defers it, but he employs his aversion only on things which are dependent on his will. For if he attempts to avoid anything independent of his will, he knows that sometimes he will fall in with something which he wishes to avoid, and he will be unhappy. Now if virtue promises good fortune and tranquillity and happiness, certainly also the progress toward virtue is progress toward each of these things. For it is always true that to whatever point the perfecting of anything leads us, progress is an approach toward this point.

How then do we admit that virtue is such as I have said, and yet seek progress in other things and make a display of it? What is the product of virtue? Tranquillity. Who then makes improvement? It is he who has read many books of Chrysippus? But does virtue consist in having understood Chrysippus? If this is so, progress is clearly nothing else than knowing a great deal of Chrysippus. But now we admit that virtue produces one thing. and we declare that approaching near to it is another thing, namely, progress or improvement. “Such a person,” says one, “is already able to read Chrysippus by himself.” Indeed, sir, you are making great progress. What kind of progress? But why do you mock the man? Why do you draw him away from the perception of his own misfortunes? Will you not show him the effect of virtue that he may learn where to look for improvement? Seek it there, wretch, where your work lies. And where is your work? In desire and in aversion, that you may not be disappointed in your desire, and that you may not fall into that which you would avoid; in your pursuit and avoiding, that you commit no error; in assent and suspension of assent, that you be not deceived. The first things, and the most necessary, are those which I have named. But if with trembling and lamentation you seek not to fall into that which you avoid, tell me how you are improving.

Do you then show me your improvement in these things? If I were talking to an athlete, I should say, “Show me your shoulders”; and then he might say, “Here are my halteres.” You and your halteres look to that. I should reply, “I wish to see the effect of the halteres.” So, when you say: “Take the treatise on the active powers, and see how I have studied it.” I reply, “Slave, I am not inquiring about this, but how you exercise pursuit and avoidance, desire and aversion, how your design and purpose and prepare yourself, whether conformably to nature or not. If conformably, give me evidence of it, and I will say that you are making progress: but if not conformably, be gone, and not only expound your books, but write such books yourself; and what will you gain by it? Do you not know that the whole book costs only five denarii? Does then the expounder seem to be worth more than five denarii? Never, then, look for the matter itself in one place, and progress toward it in another.”

Where then is progress? If any of you, withdrawing himself from externals, turns to his own will to exercise it and to improve it by labour, so as to make it conformable to nature, elevated, free, unrestrained, unimpeded, faithful, modest; and if he has learned that he who desires or avoids the things which are not in his power can neither be faithful nor free, but of necessity he must change with them and be tossed about with them as in a tempest, and of necessity must subject himself to others who have the power to procure or prevent what he desires or would avoid; finally, when he rises in the morning, if he observes and keeps these rules, bathes as a man of fidelity, eats as a modest man; in like manner, if in every matter that occurs he works out his chief principles as the runner does with reference to running, and the trainer of the voice with reference to the voice- this is the man who truly makes progress, and this is the man who has not traveled in vain. But if he has strained his efforts to the practice of reading books, and labours only at this, and has traveled for this, I tell him to return home immediately, and not to neglect his affairs there; for this for which he has traveled is nothing. But the other thing is something, to study how a man can rid his life of lamentation and groaning, and saying, “Woe to me,” and “wretched that I am,” and to rid it also of misfortune and disappointment and to learn what death is, and exile, and prison, and poison, that he may be able to say when he is in fetters, “Dear Crito, if it is the will of the gods that it be so, let it be so”; and not to say, “Wretched am I, an old man; have I kept my gray hairs for this?” Who is it that speaks thus? Do you think that I shall name some man of no repute and of low condition? Does not Priam say this? Does not OEdipus say this? Nay, all kings say it! For what else is tragedy than the perturbations of men who value externals exhibited in this kind of poetry? But if a man must learn by fiction that no external things which are independent of the will concern us, for this? part I should like this fiction, by the aid of which I should live happily and undisturbed. But you must consider for yourselves what you wish.

What then does Chrysippus teach us? The reply is, “to know that these things are not false, from which happiness comes and tranquillity arises. Take my books, and you will learn how true and conformable to nature are the things which make me free from perturbations.” O great good fortune! O the great benefactor who points out the way! To Triptolemus all men have erected temples and altars, because he gave us food by cultivation; but to him who discovered truth and brought it to light and communicated it to all, not the truth which shows us how to live, but how to live well, who of you for this reason has built an altar, or a temple, or has dedicated a statue, or who worships God for this? Because the gods have given the vine, or wheat, we sacrifice to them: but because they have produced in the human mind that fruit by which they designed to show us the truth which relates to happiness, shall we not thank God for this?

Chapter 5

Against the academics

If a man, said Epictetus, opposes evident truths, it is not easy to find arguments by which we shall make him change his opinion. But this does not arise either from the man’s strength or the teacher’s weakness; for when the man, though he has been confuted, is hardened like a stone, how shall we then be able to deal with him by argument?

Now there are two kinds of hardening, one of the understanding, the other of the sense of shame, when a man is resolved not to assent to what is manifest nor to desist from contradictions. Most of us are afraid of mortification of the body, and would contrive all means to avoid such a thing, but we care not about the soul’s mortification. And indeed with regard to the soul, if a man be in such a state as not to apprehend anything, or understand at all, we think that he is in a bad condition: but if the sense of shame and modesty are deadened, this we call even power.

Do you comprehend that you are awake? “I do not,” the man replies, “for I do not even comprehend when in my sleep I imagine that I am awake.” Does this appearance then not differ from the other? “Not at all,” he replies. Shall I still argue with this man? And what fire or what iron shall I apply to him to make him feel that he is deadened? He does perceive, but he pretends that he does not. He’s even worse than a dead man. He does not see the contradiction: he is in a bad condition. Another does see it, but he is not moved, and makes no improvement: he is even in a worse condition. His modesty is extirpated, and his sense of shame; and the rational faculty has not been cut off from him, but it is brutalized. Shall I name this strength of mind? Certainly not, unless we also name it such in catamites, through which they do and say in public whatever comes into their head.

Chapter 6

Of providence

From everything which is or happens in the world, it is easy to praise Providence, if a man possesses these two qualities, the faculty of seeing what belongs and happens to all persons and things, and a grateful disposition. If he does not possess these two qualities, one man will not see the use of things which are and which happen; another will not be thankful for them, even if he does know them. If God had made colours, but had not made the faculty of seeing them, what would have been their use? None at all. On the other hand, if He had made the faculty of vision, but had not made objects such as to fall under the faculty, what in that case also would have been the use of it? None at all. Well, suppose that He had made both, but had not made light? In that case, also, they would have been of no use. Who is it, then, who has fitted this to that and that to this? And who is it that has fitted the knife to the case and the case to the knife? Is it no one? And, indeed, from the very structure of things which have attained their completion, we are accustomed to show that the work is certainly the act of some artificer, and that it has not been constructed without a purpose. Does then each of these things demonstrate the workman, and do not visible things and the faculty of seeing and light demonstrate Him? And the existence of male and female, and the desire of each for conjunction, and the power of using the parts which are constructed, do not even these declare the workman? If they do not, let us consider the constitution of our understanding according to which, when we meet with sensible objects, we simply receive impressions from them, but we also select something from them, and subtract something, and add, and compound by means of them these things or those, and, in fact, pass from some to other things which, in a manner, resemble them: is not even this sufficient to move some men, and to induce them not to forget the workman? If not so, let them explain to us what it is that makes each several thing, or how it is possible that things so wonderful and like the contrivances of art should exist by chance and from their own proper motion?

What, then, are these things done in us only. Many, indeed, in us only, of which the rational animal had peculiar need; but you will find many common to us with irrational animals. Do they them understand what is done? By no means. For use is one thing, and understanding is another: God had need of irrational animals to make use of appearances, but of us to understand the use of appearances. It is therefore enough for them to eat and to drink, and to sleep and to copulate, and to do all the other things which they severally do. But for us, to whom He has given also the faculty, these things are not sufficient; for unless we act in a proper and orderly manner, and conformably to the nature and constitution of each thing, we shall never attain our true end. For where the constitutions of living beings are different, there also the acts and the ends are different. In those animals, then, whose constitution is adapted only to use, use alone is enough: but in an animal which has also the power of understanding the use, unless there be the due exercise of the understanding, he will never attain his proper end. Well then God constitutes every animal, one to be eaten, another to serve for agriculture, another to supply cheese, and another for some like use; for which purposes what need is there to understand appearances and to be able to distinguish them? But God has introduced man to be a spectator of God and of His works; and not only a spectator of them, but an interpreter. For this reason it is shameful for man to begin and to end where irrational animals do, but rather he ought to begin where they begin, and to end where nature ends in us; and nature ends in contemplation and understanding, in a way of life conformable to nature. Take care then not to die without having been spectators of these things.

But you take a journey to Olympia to see the work of Phidias, and all of you think it a misfortune to die without having seen such things. But when there is no need to take a journey, and where a man is, there he has the works (of God) before him, will you not desire to see and understand them? Will you not perceive either what you are, or what you were born for, or what this is for which you have received the faculty of sight? But you may say, “There are some things disagreeable and troublesome in life.” And are there none in Olympia? Are you not scorched? Are you not pressed by a crowd? Are you not without comfortable means of bathing? Are you not wet when it rains? Have you not abundance of noise, clamour, and other disagreeable things? But I suppose that setting all these things off against the magnificence of the spectacle, you bear and endure. Well, then, and have you not received faculties by which you will be able to bear all that happens? Have you not received greatness of soul? Have you not received manliness? Have you not received endurance? And why do I trouble myself about anything that can happen if I possess greatness of soul? What shall distract my mind or disturb me, or appear painful? Shall I not use the power for the purposes for which I received it, and shall I grieve and lament over what happens?

“Yes, but my nose runs.” For what purpose then, slave, have you hands? Is it not that you may wipe your nose? “Is it, then, consistent with reason that there should be running of noses in the world?” Nay, how much better it is to wipe your nose than to find fault. What do you think that Hercules would have been if there had not been such a lion, and hydra, and stag, and boar, and certain unjust and bestial men, whom Hercules used to drive away and clear out? And what would he have been doing if there had been nothing of the kind? Is it not plain that he would have wrapped himself up and have slept? In the first place, then he would not have been a Hercules, when he was dreaming away all his life in such luxury and case; and even if he had been one what would have been the use of him? and what the use of his arms, and of the strength of the other parts of his body, and his endurance and noble spirit, if such circumstances and occasions had not roused and exercised him? “Well, then, must a man provide for himself such means of exercise, and to introduce a lion from some place into his country, and a boar and a hydra?” This would be folly and madness: but as they did exist, and were found, they were useful for showing what Hercules was and for exercising him. Come then do you also having observed these things look to the faculties which you have, and when you have looked at them, say: “Bring now, O Zeus, any difficulty that Thou pleasest, for I have means given to me by Thee and powers for honoring myself through the things which happen.” You do not so; but you sit still, trembling for fear that some things will happen, and weeping, and lamenting and groaning for what does happen: and then you blame the gods. For what is the consequence of such meanness of spirit but impiety? And yet God has not only given us these faculties; by which we shall be able to bear everything that happens without being depressed or broken by it; but, like a good king and a true father, He has given us these faculties free from hindrance, subject to no compulsion unimpeded, and has put them entirely in our own power, without even having reserved to Himself any power of hindering or impeding. You, who have received these powers free and as your own, use them not: you do not even see what you have received, and from whom; some of you being blinded to the giver, and not even acknowledging your benefactor, and others, through meanness of spirit, betaking yourselves to fault finding and making charges against God. Yet I will show to you that you have powers and means for greatness of soul and manliness but what powers you have for finding fault and making accusations, do you show me.

Chapter 7

Of the use of sophistical arguments, and hypothetical, and the like

The handling of sophistical and hypothetical arguments, and of those which derive their conclusions from questioning, and in a word the handling of all such arguments, relates to the duties of life, though the many do not know this truth. For in every matter we inquire how the wise and good man shall discover the proper path and the proper method of dealing with the matter. Let, then, people either say that the grave man will not descend into the contest of question and answer, or that, if he does descend into the contest, he will take no care about not conducting himself rashly or carelessly in questioning and answering. But if they do not allow either the one or the other of these things, they must admit that some inquiry ought to be made into those topics on which particularly questioning and answering are employed. For what is the end proposed in reasoning? To establish true propositions, to remove the false, to withhold assent from those which are not plain. Is it enough then to have learned only this? “It is enough,” a man may reply. Is it, then, also enough for a man, who would not make a mistake in the use of coined money, to have heard this precept, that he should receive the genuine drachmae and reject the spurious? “It is not enough.” What, then, ought to be added to this precept? What else than the faculty which proves and distinguishes the genuine and the spurious drachmae? Consequently also in reasoning what has been said is not enough; but is it necessary that a man should acquire the faculty of examining and distinguishing the true and the false, and that which is not plain? “It is necessary.” Besides this, what is proposed in reasoning? “That you should accept what follows from that which you have properly granted.” Well, is it then enough in this case also to know this? It is not enough; but a man must learn how one thing is a consequence of other things, and when one thing follows from one thing, and when it follows from several collectively. Consider, then if it be not necessary that this power should also be acquired by him who purposes to conduct himself skillfully in reasoning, the power of demonstrating himself the several things which he has proposed, and the power of understanding the demonstrations of others, including of not being deceived by sophists, as if they were demonstrating. Therefore there has arisen among us the practice and exercise of conclusive arguments and figures, and it has been shown to be necessary.

But in fact in some cases we have properly granted the premisses or assumptions, and there results from them something; and though it is not true, yet none the less it does result. What then ought I to do? Ought I to admit the falsehood? And how is that possible? Well, should I say that I did not properly grant that which we agreed upon? “But you are not allowed to do even this.” Shall I then say that the consequence does not arise through what has been conceded? “But neither is it allowed.” What then must be done in this case? Consider if it is not this: as to have borrowed is not enough to make a man still a debtor, but to this must be added the fact that he continues to owe the money and that the debt is not paid, so it is not enough to compel you to admit the inference that you have granted the premisses, but you must abide by what you have granted. Indeed, if the premisses continue to the end such as they were when they were granted, it is absolutely necessary for us to abide by what we have granted, and we must accept their consequences: but if the premisses do not remain such as they were when they were granted, it is absolutely necessary for us also to withdraw from what we granted, and from accepting what does not follow from the words in which our concessions were made. For the inference is now not our inference, nor does it result with our assent, since we have withdrawn from the premisses which we granted. We ought then both to examine such kind of premisses, and such change and variation of them, by which in the course of questioning or answering, or in making the syllogistic conclusion, or in any other such way, the premisses undergo variations, and give occasion to the foolish to be confounded, if they do not see what conclusions are. For what reason ought we to examine? In order that we may not in this matter be employed in an improper manner nor in a confused way.

And the same in hypotheses and hypothetical arguments; for it is necessary sometimes to demand the granting of some hypothesis as a kind of passage to the argument which follows. Must we then allow every hypothesis that is proposed, or not allow every one? And if not every one, which should we allow? And if a man has allowed an hypothesis, must he in every case abide by allowing it? or must he sometimes withdraw from it, but admit the consequences and not admit contradictions? Yes; but suppose that a man says, “If you admit the hypothesis of a possibility, I will draw you to an impossibility.” With such a person shall a man of sense refuse to enter into a contest, and avoid discussion and conversation with him? But what other man than the man of sense can use argumentation and is skillful in questioning and answering, and incapable of being cheated and deceived by false reasoning? And shall he enter into the contest, and yet not take care whether he shall engage in argument not rashly and not carelessly? And if he does not take care, how can he be such a man as we conceive him to be? But without some such exercise and preparation, can he maintain a continuous and consistent argument? Let them show this; and all these speculations become superfluous, and are absurd and inconsistent with our notion of a good and serious man.

Why are we still indolent and negligent and sluggish, and why do we seek pretences for not labouring and not being watchful in cultivating our reason? “If then I shall make a mistake in these matters may I not have killed my father?” Slave, where was there a father in this matter that you could kill him? What, then, have you done? The only fault that was possible here is the fault which you have committed. This is the very remark which I made to Rufus when he blamed me for not having discovered the one thing omitted in a certain syllogism: “I suppose,” I said, “that I have burnt the Capitol.” “Slave,” he replied, “was the thing omitted here the Capitol?” Or are these the only crimes, to burn the Capitol and to kill your father? But for a man to use the appearances resented to him rashly and foolishly and carelessly, not to understand argument, nor demonstration, nor sophism, nor, in a word, to see in questioning and answering what is consistent with that which we have granted or is not consistent; is there no error in this?

Chapter 8

That the faculties are not safe to the uninstructed

In as many ways as we can change things which are equivalent to one another, in just so many ways we can change the forms of arguments and enthymemes in argumentation. This is an instance: “If you have borrowed and not repaid, you owe me the money: you have not borrowed and you have not repaid; then you do not owe me the money.” To do this skillfully is suitable to no man more than to the philosopher; for if the enthymeme is all imperfect syllogism. it is plain that he who has been exercised in the perfect syllogism must be equally expert in the imperfect also.

“Why then do we not exercise ourselves and one another in this manner?” Because, I reply, at present, though we are not exercised in these things and not distracted from the study of morality, by me at least, still we make no progress in virtue. What then must we expect if we should add this occupation? and particularly as this would not only be an occupation which would withdraw us from more necessary things, but would also be a cause of self conceit and arrogance, and no small cause. For great is the power of arguing and the faculty of persuasion, and particularly if it should be much exercised, and also receive additional ornament from language: and so universally, every faculty acquired by the uninstructed and weak brings with it the danger of these persons being elated and inflated by it. For by what means could one persuade a young man who excels in these matters that he ought not to become an appendage to them, but to make them an appendage to himself? Does he not trample on all such reasons, and strut before us elated and inflated, not enduring that any man should reprove him and remind him of what he has neglected and to what he has turned aside?

“What, then, was not Plato a philosopher?” I reply, “And was not Hippocrates a physician? but you see how Hippocrates speaks.” Does Hippocrates, then, speak thus in respect of being a physician? Why do you mingle things which have been accidentally united in the same men? And if Plato was handsome and strong, ought I also to set to work and endeavor to become handsome or strong, as if this was necessary for philosophy, because a certain philosopher was at the same time handsome and a philosopher? Will you not choose to see and to distinguish in respect to what men become philosophers, and what things belong to belong to them in other respects? And if I were a philosopher, ought you also to be made lame? What then? Do I take away these faculties which you possess? By no means; for neither do I take away the faculty of seeing. But if you ask me what is the good of man, I cannot mention to you anything else than that it is a certain disposition of the will with respect to appearances.

Chapter 9

How from the fact that we are akin to God a man may proceed to the consequences

If the things are true which are said by the philosophers about the kinship between God and man, what else remains for men to do then what Socrates did? Never in reply to the question, to what country you belong, say that you are an Athenian or a Corinthian, but that you are a citizen of the world. For why do you say that you are an Athenian, and why do you not say that you belong to the small nook only into which your poor body was cast at birth? Is it not plain that you call yourself an Athenian or Corinthian from the place which has a greater authority and comprises not only that small nook itself and all your family, but even the whole country from which the stock of your progenitors is derived down to you? He then who has observed with intelligence the administration of the world, and has learned that the greatest and supreme and the most comprehensive community is that which is composed of men and God, and that from God have descended the seeds not only to my father and grandfather, but to all beings which are generated on the earth and are produced, and particularly to rational beings- for these only are by their nature formed to have communion with God, being by means of reason conjoined with Him- why should not such a man call himself a citizen of the world, why not a son of God, and why should he be afraid of anything which happens among men? Is kinship with Caesar or with any other of the powerful in Rome sufficient to enable us to live in safety, and above contempt and without any fear at all? and to have God for your maker and father and guardian, shall not this release us from sorrows and fears?

But a man may say, “Whence shall I get bread to eat when I have nothing?”

And how do slaves, and runaways, on what do they rely when they leave their masters? Do they rely on their lands or slaves, or their vessels of silver? They rely on nothing but themselves, and food does not fail them. And shall it be necessary for one among us who is a philosopher to travel into foreign parts, and trust to and rely on others, and not to take care of himself, and shall he be inferior to irrational animals and more cowardly, each of which, being self-sufficient, neither fails to get its proper food, nor to find a suitable way of living, and one conformable to nature?

I indeed think that the old man ought to be sitting here, not to contrive how you may have no mean thoughts nor mean and ignoble talk about yourselves, but to take care that there be not among us any young men of such a mind that, when they have recognized their kinship to God, and that we are fettered by these bonds, the body, I mean, and its possessions, and whatever else on account of them is necessary to us for the economy and commerce of life, they should intend to throw off these things as if they were burdens painful and intolerable, and to depart to their kinsmen. But this is the labour that your teacher and instructor ought to be employed upon, if he really were what he should be. You should come to him and say, “Epictetus, we can no longer endure being bound to this poor body, and feeding it and giving it drink, and rest, and cleaning it, and for the sake of the body complying with the wishes of these and of those. Are not these things indifferent and nothing to us, and is not death no evil? And are we not in a manner kinsmen of God, and did we not come from Him? Allow us to depart to the place from which we came; allow us to be released at last from these bonds by which we are bound and weighed down. Here there are robbers and thieves and courts of justice, and those who are named tyrants, and think that they have some power over us by means of the body and its possessions. Permit us to show them that they have no power over any man.” And I on my part would say, “Friends, wait for God; when He shall give the signal and release you from this service, then go to Him; but for the present endure to dwell in this place where He has put you: short indeed is this time of your dwelling here, and easy to bear for those who are so disposed: for what tyrant or what thief, or what courts of justice, are formidable to those who have thus considered as things of no value the body and the possessions of the body? Wait then, do not depart without a reason.”

Something like this ought to be said by the teacher to ingenuous youths. But now what happens? The teacher is a lifeless body, and you are lifeless bodies. When you have been well filled to-day, you sit down and lament about the morrow, how you shall get something to eat. Wretch, if you have it, you will have it; if you have it not, you will depart from life. The door is open. Why do you grieve? where does there remain any room for tears? and where is there occasion for flattery? why shall one man envy another? why should a man admire the rich or the powerful, even if they be both very strong and of violent temper? for what will they do to us? We shall not care for that which they can do; and what we do care for, that they cannot do. How did Socrates behave with respect to these matters? Why, in what other way than a man ought to do who was convinced that he was a kinsman of the gods? “If you say to me now,” said Socrates to his judges, “‘We will acquit you on the condition that you no longer discourse in the way in which you have hitherto discoursed, nor trouble either our young or our old men,’ I shall answer, ‘you make yourselves ridiculous by thinking that, if one of our commanders has appointed me to a certain post, it is my duty to keep and maintain it, and to resolve to die a thousand times rather than desert it; but if God has put us in any place and way of life, we ought to desert it.’” Socrates speaks like a man who is really a kinsman of the gods. But we think about ourselves as if we were only stomachs, and intestines, and shameful parts; we fear, we desire; we flatter those who are able to help us in these matters, and we fear them also.

A man asked me to write to Rome about him, a man who, as most people thought, had been unfortunate, for formerly he was a man of rank and rich, but had been stripped of all, and was living here. I wrote on his behalf in a submissive manner; but when he had read the letter, he gave it back to me and said, “I wished for your help, not your pity: no evil has happened to me.”

Thus also Musonius Rufus, in order to try me, used to say: “This and this will befall you from your master”; and I replied that these were things which happen in the ordinary course of human affairs. “Why, then,” said he, “should I ask him for anything when I can obtain it from you?” For, in fact, what a man has from himself, it is superfluous and foolish to receive from another? Shall I, then, who am able to receive from myself greatness of soul and a generous spirit, receive from you land and money or a magisterial office? I hope not: I will not be so ignorant about my own possessions. But when a man is cowardly and mean, what else must be done for him than to write letters as you would about a corpse. “Please to grant us the body of a certain person and a sextarius of poor blood.” For such a person is, in fact, a carcass and a sextarius of blood, and nothing more. But if he were anything more, he would know that one man is not miserable through the means of another.

Chapter 10

Against those who eagerly seek preferment at Rome

If we applied ourselves as busily to our own work as the old men at Rome do to those matters about which they are employed, perhaps we also might accomplish something. I am acquainted with a man older than myself who is now superintendent of corn at Rome, and remember the time when he came here on his way back from exile, and what he said as he related the events of his former life, and how he declared that with respect to the future after his return he would look after nothing else than passing the rest of his life in quiet and tranquillity. “For how little of life,” he said, remains for me.” I replied, “You will not do it, but as soon as you smell Rome, you will forget all that you have said; and if admission is allowed even into the imperial palace, you will gladly thrust yourself in and thank God.” “If you find me, Epictetus,” he answered, “setting even one foot within the palace, think what you please.” Well, what then did he do? Before he entered the city he was met by letters from Caesar, and as soon as he received them he forgot all, and ever after has added one piece of business to another. I wish that I were now by his side to remind him of what he said when he was passing this way and to tell him how much better a seer I am than he is.

Well, then, do I say that man is an animal made for doing nothing? Certainly not. But why are we not active? For example, as to myself, as soon as day comes, in a few words I remind myself of what I must read over to my pupils; then forthwith I say to myself, “But what is it to me how a certain person shall read? the first thing for me is to sleep.” And indeed what resemblance is there between what other persons do and what we do? If you observe what they do, you will understand. And what else do they do all day long than make up accounts, inquire among themselves, give and take advice about some small quantity of grain, a bit of land, and such kind of profits? Is it then the same thing to receive a petition and to read in it: “I entreat you to permit me to export a small quantity of corn”; and one to this effect: “I entreat you to learn from Chrysippus what is the administration of the world, and what place in it the rational animal holds; consider also who you are, and what is the nature of your good and bad.” Are these things like the other, do they require equal care, and is it equally base to neglect these and those? Well, then, are we the only persons who are lazy and love sleep? No; but much rather you young men are. For we old men, when we see young men amusing themselves, are eager to play with them; and if I saw you active and zealous, much more should I be eager myself to join you in your serious pursuits.

Chapter 11

Of natural affection

When he was visited by one of the magistrates, Epictetus inquired of him about several particulars, and asked if he had children and a wife. The man replied that he had; and Epictetus inquired further, how he felt under the circumstances. “Miserable,” the man said. Then Epictetus asked, “In what respect,” for men do not marry and beget children in order to be wretched, but rather to be happy. “But I,” the man replied, “am so wretched about my children that lately, when my little daughter was sick and was supposed to be in danger, I could not endure to stay with her, but I left home till a person sent me news that she had recovered.” Well then, said Epictetus, do you think that you acted right? “I acted naturally,” the man replied. But convince me of this that you acted naturally, and I will convince you that everything which takes place according to nature takes place rightly. “This is the case,” said the man, “with all or at least most fathers.” I do not deny that: but the matter about which we are inquiring is whether such behavior is right; for in respect to this matter we must say that tumours also come for the good of the body, because they do come; and generally we must say that to do wrong is natural, because nearly all or at least most of us do wrong. Do you show me then how your behavior is natural. “I cannot,” he said; “but do you rather show me how it is not according to nature and is not rightly done.

Well, said Epictetus, if we were inquiring about white and black, what criterion should we employ for distinguishing between them? “The sight,” he said. And if about hot and cold, and hard and soft, what criterion? “The touch.” Well then, since we are inquiring about things which are according to nature, and those which are done rightly or not rightly, what kind of criterion do you think that we should employ? “I do not know,” he said. And yet not to know the criterion of colors and smells, and also of tastes, is perhaps no great harm; but if a man do not know the criterion of good and bad, and of things according to nature and contrary to nature, does this seem to you a small harm? “The greatest harm.” Come tell me, do all things which seem to some persons to be good and becoming rightly appear such; and at present as to Jews and Syrians and Egyptians and Romans, is it possible that the opinions of all of them in respect to food are right? “How is it possible?” he said. Well, I suppose it is absolutely necessary that, if the opinions of the Egyptians are right, the opinions of the rest must be wrong: if the opinions of the Jews are right, those of the rest cannot be right. “Certainly.” But where there is ignorance, there also there is want of learning and training in things which are necessary. He assented to this. You then, said Epictetus, since you know this, for the future will employ yourself seriously about nothing else, and will apply your mind to nothing else than to learn the criterion of things which are according to nature, and by using it also to determine each several thing. But in the present matter I have so much as this to aid you toward what you wish. Does affection to those of your family appear to you to be according to nature and to be good? “Certainly.” Well, is such affection natural and good, and is a thing consistent with reason not good? “By no means.” Is then that which is consistent with reason in contradiction with affection? “I think not.” You are right, for if it is otherwise, it is necessary that one of the contradictions being according to nature, the other must be contrary to nature. Is it not so? “It is,” he said. Whatever, then, we shall discover to be at the same time affectionate and also consistent with reason, this we confidently declare to be right and good. “Agreed.” Well then to leave your sick child and to go away is not reasonable, and I suppose that you will not say that it is; but it remains for us to inquire if it is consistent with affection. “Yes, let us consider.” Did you, then, since you had an affectionate disposition to your child, do right when you ran off and left her; and has the mother no affection for the child? “Certainly, she has.” Ought, then, the mother also to have left her, or ought she not? “She ought not.” And the nurse, does she love her? “She does.” Ought, then, she also to have left her? “By no means.” And the pedagogue, does he not love her? “He does love her.” Ought, then, he also to have deserted her? and so should the child have been left alone and without help on account of the great affection of you, the parents, and of those about her, or should she have died in the hands of those who neither loved her nor cared for her? “Certainly not.” Now this is unfair and unreasonable, not to allow those who have equal affection with yourself to do what you think to be proper for yourself to do because you have affection. It is absurd. Come then, if you were sick, would you wish your relations to be so affectionate, and all the rest, children and wife, as to leave you alone and deserted? “By no means.” And would you wish to be so loved by your own that through their excessive affection you would always be left alone in sickness? or for this reason would you rather pray, if it were possible, to be loved by your enemies and deserted by them? But if this is so, it results that your behavior was not at all an affectionate act.

Well then, was it nothing which moved you and induced you to desert your child? and how is that possible? But it might be something of the kind which moved a man at Rome to wrap up his head while a horse was running which he favoured; and when contrary to expectation the horse won, he required sponges to recover from his fainting fit. What then is the thing which moved? The exact discussion of this does not belong to the present occasion perhaps; but it is enough to be convinced of this, if what the philosophers say is true, that we must not look for it anywhere without, but in all cases it is one and the same thing which is the cause of our doing or not doing something, of saying or not saying something, of being elated or depressed, of avoiding anything or pursuing: the very thing which is now the cause to me and to you, to you of coming to me and sitting and hearing, and to me of saying what I do say. And what is this? Is it any other than our will to do so? “No other.” But if we had willed otherwise, what else should we have been doing than that which we willed to do? This, then, was the cause of Achilles’ lamentation, not the death of Patroclus; for another man does not behave thus on the death of his companion; but it was because he chose to do so. And to you this was the very cause of your then running away, that you chose to do so; and on the other side, if you should stay with her, the reason will be the same. And now you are going to Rome because you choose; and if you should change your mind, you will not go thither. And in a word, neither death nor exile nor pain nor anything of the kind is the cause of our doing anything or not doing; but our own opinions and our wills.

Do I convince you of this or not? “You do convince me.” Such, then, as the causes are in each case, such also are the effects. When, then, we are doing anything not rightly, from this day we shall impute it to nothing else than to the will from which we have done it: and it is that which we shall endeavour to take away and to extirpate more than the tumours and abscesses out of the body. And in like manner we shall give the same account of the cause of the things which we do right; and we shall no longer allege as causes of any evil to us, either slave or neighbour, or wife or children, being persuaded that, if we do not think things to he what we do think them to be, we do not the acts which follow from such opinions; and as to thinking or not thinking, that is in our power and not in externals. “It is so,” he said. From this day then we shall inquire into and examine nothing else, what its quality is, or its state, neither land nor slaves nor horses nor dogs, nothing else than opinions. “I hope so.” You see, then, that you must become a Scholasticus, an animal whom all ridicule, if you really intend to make an examination of your own opinions: and that this is not the work of one hour or day, you know yourself.

Chapter 12

Of contentment

With respect to gods, there are some who say that a divine being does not exist: others say that it exists, but is inactive and careless, and takes no forethought about anything; a third class say that such a being exists and exercises forethought, but only about great things and heavenly things, and about nothing on the earth; a fourth class say that a divine being exercises forethought both about things on the earth and heavenly things, but in a general way only, and not about things severally. There is a fifth class to whom Ulysses and Socrates belong, who say: “I move not without thy knowledge.”

Before all other things, then, it is necessary to inquire about each of these opinions, whether it is affirmed truly or not truly. For if there are no gods, how is it our proper end to follow them? And if they exist, but take no care of anything, in this case also how will it be right to follow them? But if indeed they do exist and look after things, still if there is nothing communicated from them to men, nor in fact to myself, how even so is it right? The wise and good man, then, after considering all these things, submits his own mind to him who administers the whole, as good citizens do to the law of the state. He who is receiving instruction ought to come to the instructed with this intention: How shall I follow the gods in all things, how shall I be contented with the divine administration, and how can I become free?” For he is free to whom everything happens according, to his will, and whom no man can hinder. “What then, is freedom madness?” Certainly not: for madness and freedom do not consist. “But,” you say, “I would have everything result just as I like, and in whatever way I like.” You are mad, you are beside yourself. Do you not know that freedom is a noble and valuable thing? But for me inconsiderately to wish for things to happen as I inconsiderately like, this appears to be not only not noble, but even most base. For how do we proceed in the matter of writing? Do I wish to write the name of Dion as I choose? No, but I am taught to choose to write it as it ought to be written. And how with respect to music? In the same manner. And what universally in every art or science? Just the same. If it were not so, it would be of no value to know anything, if knowledge were adapted to every man’s whim. Is it, then, in this alone, in this which is the greatest and the chief thing, I mean freedom, that I am permitted to will inconsiderately? By no means; but to be instructed is this, to learn to wish that everything may happen as it does. And how do things happen? As the disposer has disposed them? And he has appointed summer and winter, and abundance and scarcity, and virtue and vice, and all such opposites for the harmony of the whole; and to each of us he has given a body, and parts of the body, and possessions, and companions.

Remembering, then, this disposition of things we ought to go to be instructed, not that we may change the constitution of things- for we have not the power to do it, nor is it better that we should have the power-but in order that, as the things around us are what they are and by nature exist, we may maintain our minds in harmony with them things which happen. For can we escape from men? and how is it possible? And if we associate with them, can we chance them? Who gives us the power? What then remains, or what method is discovered of holding commerce with them? Is there such a method by which they shall do what seems fit to them, and we not the less shall be in a mood which is conformable to nature? But you are unwilling to endure and are discontented: and if you are alone, you call it solitude; and of you are with men, you call them knaves and robbers; and you find fault with your own parents and children, and brothers and neighbours. But you ought when you are alone to call this condition by the name of tranquillity and freedom, and to think yourself like to the gods; and when you are with many, you ought not to call it crowd, nor trouble, nor uneasiness, but festival and assembly, and so accept all contentedly.

What, then, is the punishment of those who do not accept? It is to be what they are. Is any person dissatisfied with being alone, let him be alone. Is a man dissatisfied with his parents? let him be a bad son, and lament. Is he dissatisfied with his children? let him be a bad father. “Cast him into prison.” What prison? Where he is already, for he is there against his will; and where a man is against his will, there he is in prison. So Socrates was not in prison, for he was there willingly. “Must my leg then be lamed?” Wretch, do you then on account of one poor leg find fault with the world? Will you not willingly surrender it for the whole? Will you not withdraw from it? Will you not gladly part with it to him who gave it? And will you be vexed and discontented with the things established by Zeus, which he with the Moirae who were present and spinning the thread of your generation, defined and put in order? Know you not how small a part you are compared with the whole. I mean with respect to the body, for as to intelligence you are not inferior to the gods nor less; for the magnitude of intelligence is not measured by length nor yet by height, but by thoughts.

Will you not, then, choose to place your good in that in which you are equal to the gods? “Wretch that I am to have such a father and mother.” What, then, was it permitted to you to come forth, and to select, and to say: “Let such a man at this moment unite with such a woman that I may be produced?” It was not permitted, but it was a necessity for your parents to exist first, and then for you to be begotten. Of what kind of parents? Of such as they were. Well then, since they are such as they are, is there no remedy given to you? Now if you did not know for what purpose you possess the faculty of vision, you would be unfortunate and wretched if you closed your eyes when colors were brought before them; but in that you possess greatness of soul and nobility of spirit for every event that may happen, and you know not that you possess them, are you not more unfortunate and wretched? Things are brought close to you which are proportionate to the power which you possess, but you turn away this power most particularly at the very time when you ought to maintain it open and discerning. Do you not rather thank the gods that they have allowed you to be above these things which they have not placed in your power; and have made you accountable only for those which are in your power? As to your parents, the gods have left you free from responsibility; and so with respect to your brothers, and your body, and possessions, and death and life. For what, then, have they made you responsible? For that which alone is in your power, the proper use of appearances. Why then do you draw on yourself the things for which you are not responsible? It is, indeed, a giving of trouble to yourself.

Chapter 13

How everything may he done acceptably to the gods

When some one asked, how may a man eat acceptably to the gods, he answered: If he can eat justly and contentedly, and with equanimity, and temperately and orderly, will it not be also acceptably to the gods? But when you have asked for warm water and the slave has not heard, or if he did hear has brought only tepid water, or he is not even found to be in the house, then not to be vexed or to burst with passion, is not this acceptable to the gods? “How then shall a man endure such persons as this slave?” Slave yourself, will you not bear with your own brother, who has Zeus for his progenitor, and is like a son from the same seeds and of the same descent from above? But if you have been put in any such higher place, will you immediately make yourself a tyrant? Will you not remember who you are, and whom you rule? that they are kinsmen, that they are brethren by nature, that they are the offspring of Zeus? “But I have purchased them, and they have not purchased me.” Do you see in what direction you are looking, that it is toward the earth, toward the pit, that it is toward these wretched laws of dead men? but toward the laws of the gods you are not looking.

Chapter 14

That the deity oversees all things

When a person asked him how a man could be convinced that all his actions are under the inspection of God, he answered, Do you not think that all things are united in one? “I do,” the person replied. Well, do you not think that earthly things have a natural agreement and union with heavenly things “I do.” And how else so regularly as if by God’s command, when He bids the plants to flower, do they flower? when He bids them to send forth shoots, do they shoot? when He bids them to produce fruit, how else do they produce fruit? when He bids the fruit to ripen, does it ripen? when again He bids them to cast down the fruits, how else do they cast them down? and when to shed the leaves, do they shed the leaves? and when He bids them to fold themselves up and to remain quiet and rest, how else do they remain quiet and rest? And how else at the growth and the wane of the moon, and at the approach and recession of the sun, are so great an alteration and change to the contrary seen in earthly things? But are plants and our bodies so bound up and united with the whole, and are not our souls much more? and our souls so bound up and in contact with God as parts of Him and portions of Him; and does not God perceive every motion of these parts as being His own motion connate with Himself? Now are you able to think of the divine administration, and about all things divine, and at the same time also about human affairs, and to be moved by ten thousand things at the same time in your senses and in your understanding, and to assent to some, and to dissent from others, and again as to some things to suspend your judgment; and do you retain in your soul so many impressions from so many and various things, and being moved by them, do you fall upon notions similar to those first impressed, and do you retain numerous arts and the memories of ten thousand things; and is not God able to oversee all things, and to be present with all, and to receive from all a certain communication? And is the sun able to illuminate so large a part of the All, and to leave so little not illuminated, that part only which is occupied by the earth’s shadow; and He who made the sun itself and makes it go round, being a small part of Himself compared with the whole, cannot He perceive all things?

“But I cannot,” the man may reply, “comprehend all these things at once.” But who tells you that you have equal power with Zeus? Nevertheless he has placed by every man a guardian, every man’s Demon, to whom he has committed the care of the man, a guardian who never sleeps, is never deceived. For to what better and more careful guardian could He have entrusted each of us? When, then, you have shut the doors and made darkness within, remember never to say that you are alone, for you are not; but God is within, and your Demon is within, and what need have they of light to see what you are doing? To this God you ought to swear an oath just as the soldiers do to Caesar. But they who are hired for pay swear to regard the safety of Caesar before all things; and you who have received so many and such great favours, will you not swear, or when you have sworn, will you not abide by your oath? And what shall you swear? Never to be disobedient, never to make any charges, never to find fault with anything that he has given, and never unwillingly to do or to suffer anything, that is necessary. Is this oath like the soldier’s oath? The soldiers swear not to prefer any man to Caesar: in this oath men swear to honour themselves before all.

Chapter 15

What philosophy promises

When a man was consulting him how he should persuade his brother to cease being angry with him, Epictetus replied: Philosophy does not propose to secure for a man any external thing. If it did philosophy would be allowing something which is not within its province. For as the carpenter’s material is wood, and that of the statuary is copper, so the matter of the art of living is each man’s life. “What then is my brother’s?” That again belongs to his own art; but with respect to yours, it is one of the external things, like a piece of land, like health, like reputation. But Philosophy promises none of these. “In every circumstance I will maintain,” she says, “the governing part conformable to nature.” Whose governing part? “His in whom I am,” she says.

“How then shall my brother cease to be angry with me?” Bring him to me and I will tell him. But I have nothing to say to you about his anger.

When the man, who was consulting him, said, “I seek to know this- how, even if my brother is not reconciled to me, shall I maintain myself in a state conformable to nature?” Nothing great, said Epictetus, is produced suddenly, since not even the grape or the fig is. If you say to me now that you want a fig, I will answer to you that it requires time: let it flower first, then put forth fruit, and then ripen. Is, then, the fruit of a fig-tree not perfected suddenly and in one hour, and would you possess the fruit of a man’s mind in so short a time and so easily? Do not expect it.

Office: Room 103 in 16 Glebe
(Note: the Philosophy Department is in two buildings. Our mailboxes are next door in 14 Glebe.)
Office hours: Tuesday, Thursday 10-12. Office phone: 953-7272
Email: Bakerja@cofc.edu
Class blog: http://philosophy101.wordpress.com
To post, start at www.wordpress.com and enter user name: EthicsClass; password: Phil101

Text: The Meaning of Life: A Reader (Oxford)– available in the campus book store. Many of our readings will be posted on the blog.

In this course students will be introduced to the various subfields of philosophy through the analysis of primary readings. There are four goals for students in this course.
1. One goal is that students get a useful introduction to the field of philosophy and its unique methodology by critically engaging the various views we will read.
2. A second goal is that students get comfortable with the subject matter of philosophy, so they will recognize philosophical topics for what they are.
3. The third goal is that students develop and defend their own positions, becoming, in this sense, philosophers themselves.
4. A fourth and final goal is to merely learn some of the views of our well-known authors. It is crucial to become familiar with many of these authors for the sake of a liberal education.

10% of the grade is the reading responses and any in-class quizzes;
20% midterm;
10% class presentation project (requires blog posts and hand-outs);
30% final exam;
30% final paper.

Participation in this Course
There are not many subjects where disagreement will be inevitable, and there are not many subjects where debate with others will help you to understand your own position and elucidate your own values. But our class subjects have these qualities. This makes class discussion particularly important. We will learn to disagree with each other without rancor or embarrassment. But this requires that you do come to class ready to discuss the topics in the reading.

In the first class, you will be asked about the time and place you have devoted to reading for this course. Our readings are not very long (on occasion, however, they can be up to 40 pages), but philosophy is slow to read, because it requires that you do more than skim and memorize. You will need to think about the views you are reading.

For this reason, it will help you to do a reading response for every reading assignment we have. These will be posted to the class blog. These need to include a careful description and criticism of the reading’s argument or main ideas. These can be very short if they are thoughtful. You do not need to edit very carefully, and may type as you think (as long as you do answer the questions.)
To get credit for completing the assignment, these must be sent before the start of class. I will not accept any of these late (the purpose of them is just to get you ready to discuss the issues in class.)

Presentation/ Class Post. Students will also be required to post their position on a topic once in this course. I’ll explain how this works in the first class.

Paper
There is one 6-8 page paper required for this course. The final paper is worth 30% of your grade.

Academic Integrity
Do not plagiarize or cheat. It is not fair to the other students. It is insulting to your own abilities. It is also surprisingly easy to detect work that is not original, especially since the topics in this course are rather unique.

If you do not understand the material, see me as soon as possible (right after a confusing class or reading, for example.) You can certainly come to understand all of the material with some help. The penalties for cheating are very stiff, and I will report any cheating to the deans.

Attendance policy
Attendance is required. This is even more important in an Express course. The students who miss classes are going to be the ones who complain about the difficulty of the material. Crucial information about class logistics is given out in class, and students will need the help of lecture to make sense of the material. Any absence will need to be excused. Three absences are grounds for a loss of participation credit in the final grade.

SCHEDULE (B: posted on blog, M: Meaning of Life text)
March 11: Introduction. What philosophy is like. Epistemology, Metaphyics, Ethics. Plato, in class.

March 16: Plato. Forms, Knowledge, and Goodness. B.

March 18: Modernity. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sysphus, p. 72-81. M. Thomas Nagel: The Absurd, p. 143-152. M.

March 23: The methodology of analytic philosophy. Joel Feinberg: Absurd Self-Fulfillment, p. 153- 183. M.

March 25: Aristotle. Science, Knowledge, and Virtue. B.

March 30: The Meaning of Life. Susan Wolf, “The Meaning of Lives”, B.
Arthur Schopenhauer, p. 45-54. M.

April 1: The Stoics. B.

April 6: A. J. Ayer, p. 199- 202. M.
Steven Cahn, p. 236- 238. M.
Robert Nozick, p. 224-231. M.

April 8: Midterm.

April 13: Political Theory. Rawls. B.

April 15: Epistemology. Gettier and Goldman. B.

April 20: Chisholm. B.

April 22: Quine. B.

April 27: Final papers due.

Final Exam: May 1st. 12-3, same room.