Standpoints

10 Old Ideas In a New World

Svend Brinkmann

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781509523764
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Self-help gurus, life coaches and business consultants love to tell us that we must strive for constant self-improvement to realize our full potential and become truly happy. But it doesn't seem to work - for many of us, life still seems hollow and meaningless. So focused are we on personal development and material possessions that we've overlooked the things that make life truly fulfilling and worthwhile. So how do we figure out what's really worth striving for? In this compelling follow-up to his bestselling book Stand Firm, Danish philosopher and psychologist Svend Brinkmann shows us that the important things in life are those with intrinsic value, like goodness, freedom, truth and love. We should stop asking 'what's in it for me?', and turn our attention outwards to our friends, families and communities. By putting others first and embracing these unconditional principles, or standpoints, he argues, we can find a more meaningful and sustainable way of living.

1
The Good

If there is something we do for its own sake, it must be the overall good.

Aristotle (384–322 BCE)

I am an aficionado of the in-flight magazine. Sitting nervously, strapped into a tiny little seat and forbidden to go online, one of the few distractions is the magazine wedged deliberately in the pocket in front of you. The September 2015 edition of the SAS magazine Scandinavian Traveler was devoted to ‘the good’, which attracted my attention and piqued my philosophical curiosity. ‘The Good Issue’, as this edition was called, was full of articles about goodness, in many different forms. The most illuminating was probably the article on research, which explored the question posed by its title: ‘Why be good?’¹ Why should we be morally good? Although this is a question with which many of the great thinkers have wrestled over the millennia, the article does not cite any of them, preferring instead to refer to contemporary psychology. It posits five answers, each of which is based on giving something to others, and alleges that they are supported by psychological and scientific literature (including brain research). The article says that we should be good because (1) giving makes us feel happy, (2) when we give, we receive, (3) giving evokes gratitude, (4) giving is good for our health, and (5) giving is contagious – it inspires others to do the same.

Apart from the final reason, which at least involves something other than psychological benefits for the giver, each of the reasons is instrumental – it is about what we get out of giving. They are also subjectivist and egocentric, in that they refer to what we ourselves get out of it. In short, giving makes us happy and healthy. Good news, of course, but is that really why we should be good? Aristotle, the first of the great anti-instrumentalist thinkers presented in this book, would doubtless respond in the negative: there are things that we ought to do irrespective of whether we ourselves will get something out of it. According to Aristotle, not everything can be measured quantitatively on scales of happiness and health. If we do something that has intrinsic value (e.g. being kind to others), it has a form of meaning and dignity in itself – regardless of the consequences for our own health, happiness or well-being. In our age of instrumentalisation, people’s first instinct when called upon to do something is often to ask ‘what’s in it for me?’ – rather than to think about what is worth doing.

The first standpoint upon which, I would suggest, it is worth standing firm is more or less the opposite of the vision of goodness expressed in Scandinavian Traveler – and perpetuated throughout society. It is an overarching thesis that underpins the other ideas, and that is why I think it is important to start with it, although there are many other good reasons to start with Aristotle, as he and Plato (427–347 BCE) are probably the most important thinkers in the history of Western philosophy. I will not dwell on Aristotle’s biography. This book is not about the history of philosophy, after all. However, it is worth mentioning that he studied at Plato’s Academy in Athens and that, following the death of his mentor, Aristotle tutored Alexander the Great and went on to found his own school of philosophy. His works, which deal with virtually every scientific and philosophical question, were forgotten in the West for hundreds of years following the fall of the Roman Empire, but were rediscovered thanks to the Arab scholars who had preserved his writings. During the Middle Ages, the big intellectual challenge consisted of reconciling Aristotle’s science and philosophy with Christianity.

Despite their master/pupil relationship, there were major differences between Plato and Aristotle. In his dialogues, through the voice of Socrates, Plato advocated a philosophy that posited an ideal world of eternal, immutable ideas – which he called forms – of which the world as we experience it is merely a pale reflection. He also believed in the immortality of the soul. For Aristotle, however, the body and soul are inextricably linked (the soul is the form of the living body), and therefore the soul ceases to exist when the body dies. He formulated a doctrine in which material substances consist of forms (or ideas) that manifest themselves in matter, whereas Plato saw forms as existing in an eternal realm that lies beyond matter. The difference was encapsulated by the Renaissance painter Raphael in his famous The School of Athens (1509), which depicts a gathering of all of the great ancient philosophers, with Plato and Aristotle in the middle. Plato points upwards towards the eternal ideas, while Aristotle stretches out his hand in an attempt to touch the worldly. His motto might have been ‘have faith in the Earth’ – an idea not articulated until a couple of millennia later by Nietzsche.

Thus, while Plato, with his aesthetically appealing dialogues, has inspired many artists and poets (despite his notorious scepticism about poetry), Aristotle has inspired science, logic and rational thinking. Aristotle was in many ways the originator of the various sciences and the distinctions between them. He was an observant natural scientist, who considered humankind to be a social species like swans and bees, but also acknowledged that we are a uniquely political and rational animal. Humans are therefore not solely governed by their instincts. By exercising judgement, we are capable of deciding what is the right thing to do in a given situation. We are not solely driven by biological impulses. Other good reasons motivate us too, including ethical ones. However, we are only capable of this once we have learned to do so – in other words, when we have had our character shaped and we have acquired virtues within an organised political community, or polis (the Greek city state). As the Greeks put it, Polis andra didaske (‘man is shaped by the city’) – we are only human in a real sense if we are provided with a stable social structure in which to form our character. The question is then whether our modern instrumentalised culture offers such a structure or polis.

So what does Aristotle have to do with instrumentalisation and our question about meaning and value? The answer is that he, more than any other philosopher, was responsible for founding an anti-instrumentalist way of thinking that is still relevant to this day. We might even go as far as to say that his understanding of humankind is linked to a kind of anti-instrumentalism. To paraphrase the introduction to his famous book The Nicomachean Ethics: all human endeavour is thought to aim at some good. While the purpose of some activities lies outside the activities themselves, other activities are for their own sake. If it is true that not all of our activities are instrumental (in other words, aimed at achieving something other than the activity itself), it must be possible to identify what we do for its own sake – and this must then be the overall good. ‘[The] end of the medical art is health, that of shipbuilding a vessel, that of strategy victory, that of economics wealth’, he writes.² We might extrapolate from this and ask whether health, victory and wealth are also means, or whether they are ends in themselves.

The Nicomachean Ethics originally served as a manuscript for lectures designed to shape Aristotle’s audiences into good people and citizens. It is a study of what constitutes the good in life – eudaimonia – and of the virtues and human characteristics needed to achieve this state. Aristotle asks: Which characteristics do we need in order for us to participate in those activities that are undertaken for their own sake? How are these characteristics developed? And – not least – what are these activities? If it is true, as I argued in the Prologue, that a meaningful life is best understood as one in which we engage in activities with intrinsic value, then Aristotle’s ethics are ultimately about what constitutes a meaningful life and how to live one.

Eudaimonia and the virtues

Aristotle’s answer to the question of what activities we indulge in for their own sake points mainly in the direction of what we might call ethical actions. The meaningful and flourishing life – eudaimonia – is one in which we do good deeds. Good deeds are an end in themselves and fundamental to eudaimonia. What makes a deed good (for example, helping somebody in need) is not the honour, fame or money attributed to the person who does it – although these may well be among its outcomes – but the fact that the action is good per se. The human virtues (practical reason, courage, moderation, etc.) are thus the traits that make us capable of doing good deeds. Aristotle’s concept of virtue is therefore completely different from modern talk of a ‘virtuous person’, which has an old-fashioned, almost prudish ring to it. Aristotelian virtues are closer to our psychological concept of personality traits or character, only seen from a perspective that evaluates ethically.

As well as good deeds in an ethical sense, Aristotle also identifies contemplation as an end in itself. Humans are rational animals, so it is hardly surprising that it is when we deploy our unique powers to reason and to define that we live a meaningful life. According to Aristotle, reason is both practical (when it translates into good deeds) and theoretical (when contemplating existential and cosmic questions). The contemplative element may sound strange, but it is actually quite simple. Many non-scientists enjoy TV programmes about science (physics, biology, etc.). I often watch them with my children. In all probability, neither I nor the kids will ever ‘use’ the knowledge that we acquire, but there is something fundamentally salutary and significant about being introduced to the complexities of the origins and evolution of the universe, the evolution of the species and humanity’s place in the cosmos. One of my favourite books is A Short History of Nearly Everything, by the popular non-fiction writer Bill Bryson – not because it is exceptionally thorough or profound (self-evidently not, as it relates the whole history of the universe in one easily accessible book), but because reading it makes us appreciate the universe in all its myriad complexity, as well as the happy coincidence that we, ourselves, are part of it. Aristotle would probably say that it is precisely the ‘uselessness’ of this knowledge that is the best thing about it, because it is knowledge acquired for its own sake, and not in order to achieve something else. Watching science programmes or reading Bryson’s book are examples of the type of practices also cultivated by the later Stoic philosophers, who sought to acknowledge that we are all part of a greater whole (the cosmos).³ This acknowledgement or knowledge has no other purpose than acknowledgement itself, in the same way that ethical actions ought not to have any other purpose than the actions themselves. This is one of the key points in Aristotle: the good is defined as that which has its own intrinsic value. In this sense, the good consists of the useless – which, paradoxically, can be seen as useful precisely because it is useless. The following nine chapters identify other useless phenomena and define them as existential standpoints in a meaningful life.

One way to understand Aristotle’s ancient, and potentially quite alien, idea of uselessness is to look at his book about ethics. It includes an analysis of friendship and its importance in life. Aristotle distinguishes between three types of friendship – the useful (based on utility), the pleasurable, and the noble (based on goodness). A clear example of friendship based on utility would be our relationship to contacts on LinkedIn, the purpose of which is professional networking – an inherently utilitarian pursuit. This is a purely instrumental relationship because it only has value if there is something in it, if it is mutually beneficial. The relationship has no intrinsic value, only utilitarian value. Friendships based on pleasure are similar, only the motivation is the individual’s craving for pleasant and pleasurable experiences. We enter into relationships because they are fun and entertaining – once that stops being the case, they lose their justification. According to Aristotle, relationships based on utility and pleasure cannot be friendships in the proper sense, because they are defined in solely instrumental terms. Noble friendships, on the other hand, are motivated by the wish that t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Preface
• Prologue: The Meaningful Life
• 1 The Good (Aristotle)
• 2 Dignity (Kant)
• 3 The Promise (Nietzsche)
• 4 The Self (Kierkegaard)
• 5 Truth (Arendt)
• 6 Responsibility (Løgstrup)
• 7 Love (Murdoch)
• 8 Forgiveness (Derrida)
• 9 Freedom (Camus)
• 10 Death (Montaigne)
• Epilogue: Perspectives on the Meaning of Life
• End User License Agreement