Human Predicaments

And What to Do about Them

John Kekes

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780226359595
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

In his latest book, esteemed philosopher John Kekes draws on anthropology, history, and literature in order to help us cope with the common predicaments that plague us as we try to take control of our lives. In each chapter he offers fascinating new ways of thinking about a particular problem that is fundamental to how we live, such as facing difficult choices, uncontrollable contingencies, complex evaluations, the failures of justice, the miasma of boredom, and the inescapable hypocrisies of social life.Kekes considers how we might deal with these predicaments by comparing how others in different times and cultures have approached them. He examines what is good, bad, instructive, and dangerous in the sexually charged politics of the Shilluk, the Hindu caste system, Balinese role-morality, the religious passion of Cortes and Simone Weil, the fate of Colonel Hiromichi Yahara during and after the battle for Okinawa, the ritual human sacrifices of the Aztecs, and the tragedies to which innocence may lead. In doing so, he shakes us out of our deep-seated ways of thinking, enlarging our understanding of the possibilities available to us as we struggle with the problems that stand in the way of how we want to live. The result is a highly interesting journey through time and space that illuminates and helps us cope with some of the most basic predicaments we all face as human beings.

1

Human Predicaments and Problems

The Question

Suppose you ask yourself during a sleepless night: do you regret any of the major decisions you have made? Are you content with your personal relationships, the work you do, your health, the state of your finances, where and how you live, your sex life, the respect and appreciation you get from others? Do you have lasting feelings of shame, guilt, anxiety, boredom, envy, regret, or resentment about how your life is unfolding? Do you think you have missed valuable opportunities or failed in ways that matter? Would you say that all in all your life is going as you want, that you want it to continue without significant changes, and that you feel good about it? Are you just willing to put up with your life as it is or do you actively like it? I doubt that many of us could honestly say that our life is not just good enough, but really good. Most of us want it to be better than it is, but we are uncertain about how to make it better. And that is the source of human predicaments and the particular problems involved in them.

The aim of this book is to arrive at a deeper understanding of these predicaments and to consider what we could do about them. The “we” in question are adults living in affluent, democratic societies in North America and Europe, roughly from the 1950s on. This is a narrow context that excludes many people, societies, and historical periods in which people face or have faced similar predicaments, just as we do in ours. Although I focus on our context, I will stress again and again that comparisons with other contexts are centrally important for understanding our predicaments and how we might reasonably respond to them. Still, our predicaments arise in our context and it is in it that we have to understand and cope with the resulting problems.

Our context, however, is different from the others with which I will compare it. In the others, poverty is more widespread; political regimes are more repressive; and the burdens of the past restrict present possibilities more than they restrict ours. We enjoy better living standards, medical care, education, political stability, and democratic governance than what was possible for most people, apart from a few privileged ones, ever before in human history. Nevertheless, we are troubled by problems in the midst of our better conditions. Why?

We emerge from childhood with an upbringing that has taught us timeless truths, prudential proverbs and catchphrases, silly mistakes, pernicious prejudices, important information, basic skills, and rules drummed into us. Out of such material we form a vague, unstable, and inarticulate view of how we think we should live. It is usually a mixture of unexamined beliefs, emotions, desires, values, experiences, preferences, and aspirations. I will refer to them jointly as our personal attitude to life. It motivates us to live and act in ways that—unsurprisingly—often conflict and change in response to changes in the conditions of our context and in our attitude. One source of our predicaments and problems is this ill-formed and uncritically held personal attitude that initially guides how we think we should live. We need something more reliable, better tested, less labile to guide how we should live than the largely unchosen and often shifting personal attitude of our early years. This something is the evaluative framework of our society.1

It is a system of widely shared aesthetic, economic, educational, legal, literary, medical, moral, political, religious, scientific, and other modes of evaluation. The evaluations derived from them often conflict, their relative importance is frequently controversial, and the conditions to which they guide possible responses continually change. The evaluative framework is not a rigid structure but a flexible social construct always in a state of flux. Some of its parts are temporarily stable, others are being questioned, enlarged, abandoned, or reformed in the light of criticisms and changing conditions. Think of what has been happening to our evaluations, for instance, of beauty, chastity, culture, faith, honor, modesty, privacy, or thrift.

If we proceed from our point of view as participants, we can say that the context of our evaluative framework is usually the society in which we live, although it may cut across several societies. We share our commitment to it with others, even though we do not know many of them. Yet we are bound together by a tacit agreement that we should be guided by many of the same evaluations. We are unlikely to agree about all of them, but we do share at least some of the important ones, draw some of the same distinctions, favor or condemn many of the same possibilities of life, and pursue many of the same aims. We largely agree about what evaluative considerations are relevant, even if we act contrary to them and disagree about their relative importance. It may be said, metaphorically, that what we share is an evaluative vocabulary, although we may use it to make very different evaluations.

Ideological and religious differences, waves of immigration, multiculturalism, and secularization have transformed our society and made it much less homogeneous than it used to be. Now, several evaluative frameworks coexist in greater or lesser harmony. If we share an evaluative framework, we have a bond, but it is not a bondage. Some of its evaluations are controversial, others are changing, priorities shift. Yet its hold on us is very strong because it provides the evaluations that enable us to distinguish between good and bad, better and worse, important and unimportant possibilities in our lives. The evaluative framework is an essential part of the context in which we can try to live as we think we should.

In fortunate circumstances when the evaluative framework is good enough, we need not pay attention to it in the routine conduct of our affairs. We know what we can and cannot, should and should not do, and how to do what we want or must. We keep appointments, pay bills, enjoy what we can, raise our children, and do our job. There are difficult situations, of course, and then we have to stop and think. But when all goes well that does not happen often.

If our routine transactions become fraught with conflicts, if we are frequently uncertain about how to evaluate the possibilities we might pursue, then our life becomes uncertain. The bond we used to share with others is fraying. If our conflicts spread from occasional difficult situations to the routines of everyday life, then they cast doubt on our entire evaluative framework. We lose confidence in how we think we should live, in what we owe to others and they to us, and in our ability to cope with our increasingly frequent conflicts. But even in fortunate circumstances we have to contend with our conflicting evaluations and difficult choices about marriage, love affairs, raising children, political matters, and the relative importance we attribute to beauty, death, friendship, honor, justice, loyalty, money, privacy, recognition, sex, and so forth. The difficult choices these conflicting evaluations force us to make are not irrevocable, but they do change us. We may also find that our conflicting evaluations are changing as we change partly as a result of past choices we have made or failed to make. Our evaluative framework provides the means of evaluating the possibilities between which, if all goes well, we can choose. And we choose reasonably if we find an acceptable fit between the evaluations we have derived from the modes of evaluation of our evaluative framework and from our own often inarticulate, fallible, and changing personal attitude that guides how we think we should live.

Participation in an evaluative framework is the key to a life in which we can cope with our conflicting evaluations and difficult choices. If the evaluative framework is threatened, the conditions of life as we know them are threatened. The threat is that we will become unable to make reasonable choices between good and bad possibilities of life. We come to doubt that the evaluative framework on which we rely is actually reliable. And we come to doubt also our personal attitude because we realize that it may be based on wishful thinking, or it is misled by fear or lack of imagination, or that it involves false beliefs, misdirected emotions, and contrary desires.

Our doubts make it very difficult for us to choose between the conflicting evaluations that follow from our evaluative framework and personal attitude. We become uncertain about how we should live. And that leads to the predicaments of life this book is about. I will discuss the problems involved in them in the chapters that follow. They are deep conflicts, difficult choices, vulnerability to fate and to the contingencies of life, our divided self, the complexities of evaluations, inescapable hypocrisies, the miasma of boredom, the prevalence of evil, and the danger of innocence. These problems occur in different, often very different, forms in different contexts. Still, chapters 2–6 are about problems that are easily recognizable in different contexts, while chapters 7–11 are about problems that are particularly acute in our present context; they are perhaps even characteristic of our lives here and now. All these problems are exceptionally hard because our efforts to cope with them are affected by the problems with which we are trying to cope. Such self-referential problems are part of the human condition, but the forms in which they occur and have to be faced vary with contexts. I will discuss them as they are in our context.

The Aim

Each chapter has a constructive and a critical aim. The constructive one is to show that we can understand and respond to a particular problem of life reasonably, but only by considering the context-dependent conflicts, choices, and possibilities that give rise to that problem. The critical aim is to show that we cannot arrive at a reasonable understanding and response by a theory that abstracts from individual differences and appeals to an ideal that reason requires everyone in all contexts to follow.

These constructive and critical aims are contrary to the widely shared assumption that pervades contemporary thought that there could be an ideal theory.2 The ideal has been variously identified as eudaimonia, the love of God, natural law, the categorical imperative, the common good, rationality, autonomy, justice, happiness, and so on. Whatever the ideal is supposed to be, a theory of it claims that reason requires everyone to follow it. I do not think that such a theory could be found. This needs to be shown, of course, not just said. And I will show it again and again in the following chapters, in which I consider how we might cope with particular problems and why no ideal theory could help us do that.

If we reject ideal theories, we must face the question of how we should cope with the problems of life. We find, then, that we have to rely on our evaluative framework and personal attitude regardless of our doubts about them, because we have no other way of evaluating the available possibilities of life. We can sometimes make a considerable effort and transfer our allegiance to another evaluative framework or form another personal attitude, but it will have its own problems. In our life as it now is, we depend on the prevailing aesthetic, economic, educational, legal, literary, medical, moral, political, religious, scientific, and other modes of evaluation, and on our personal attitude. They are as much part of us as our native language, gender, sexual preferences, manual dexterity, and limbs.

We do not have to accept all the evaluations that follow from them. We may reject an entire mode of evaluation or change our personal attitude. Nevertheless, it is impossible not to be strongly influenced by many of the evaluations that follow from them, even if we are critical of some of them. But if we are critical, it is because they conflict with other evaluations we also derive from our evaluative framework or personal attitude. These conflicts make us conflicted, force us to make difficult choices between our own evaluations, and lead to the problems of life we have to face and cope with in our context.

These problems indicate that something is wrong with the prevailing evaluative framework, its modes of evaluation, or with our personal attitude. They may be faulty, but the problems would occur even if they were faultless. For the possibilities of life we value may conflict and we may be conflicted about the choice between them. We may be divided between ambitious striving and peace of mind, present enjoyments or hoped-for future ones, prudence and truthfulness, compassion and justice, duty and happiness, and so on. These and many other problems are familiar experiences in most of our lives, and force us to make difficult choices.

Part of what makes problems of life very hard is that we have strong reasons for valuing both of the conflicting possibilities of life between which we have to choose. These reasons follow from how we think we should live. We value the conflicting possibilities from that point of view. Yet we must choose between them because we cannot have both. Whichever we choose, we must give up a possibility we genuinely and reasonably value. We give it up in order to pursue another possibility we value even more, but that does not make the loss of the possibility we value easier to bear, nor the choice easier to make. We will find the problems of life hard even if we are as reasonable as possible.

Many different evaluative frameworks, modes of evaluation, and personal attitudes that guide how we should live render our problems even more onerous. We value their diversity because they enrich the possibilities of life. But we pay for it by having to cope with the resulting problems, conflicts, and choices. Doing that depends on distinguishing between reasonable and unreasonable evaluative frameworks, modes of evaluation, and personal attitudes. Each of the following chapters draws that distinction, as we try to find the best way of coping with a particular problem of life in a particular context.

What that way is depends on what the particular problems are, what context they occur in, and what alternative possibilities are available. Their unavoidable particularity rules out the sort of universal answer that ideal theorists seek. But that still leaves reasonable particular answers, as I will show. However, there are some minimum conditions that must be met by all reasonable evaluative frameworks, modes of evaluation, and personal attitudes that might guide our efforts to find reasonable ways of coping. They must make it possible to satisfy basic needs we all have; provide some way in which we can evaluate and choose between conflicting possibilities; have sufficient flexibility to respond to changing condition; and have modes of evaluations in terms of which we can live a meaningful and worthwhile life.

We cannot reasonably accept any evaluative framework, mode of evaluation, or personal attitude if it fails to meet these minimum conditions. There is a great diversity of ways in which these conditions can be met. And those that meet them may still be more or less reasonable, depending on the extent to which they fulfill these conditions. Diversity, therefore, does not lead to the relativistic denial that it is possible to provide reasons for and against our acceptance of evaluative frameworks, modes of evaluation, and personal attitudes. There are reasons beyond these minimal ones, but I postpone discussion of them.

My overall aim is to arrive at a deeper understanding of human predicaments and of how we might reasonably cope with them. Each chapter is centrally concerned with comparing our ways of understanding and coping with the particular problems to which general human predicaments lead with other ways recognized in anthropological, historical, and literary contexts that are often very different from ours. We can then consider whether our ways are more or less reasonable than these others. This may allow us to improve our ways, if we find other ways better. These comparisons deepen our understanding of the possibilities of life by giving us imaginative entry into possibilities recognized in other contexts. This enriches us, makes us less parochial, and provides points of view external to our own from which we can evaluate how we think we should live. The aim of this approach is not to justify or criticize how others live in other contexts, but to learn from their good or bad examples and thereby evaluate more reasonably how we live in our context.

I write as a philosopher, but my approach is not in the mainstream of English-speaking philosophy, as it is currently understood and practiced. I approach philosophy as a humanistic discipline3 that is concerned with how we should live from our unavoidably changing, context-dependent, and fallible human point of view. This approach and point of view are part of an old but continuing tradition that regards philosophy as a way of understanding and coping with human predicaments.4 This is of concern to thoughtful people, not an academic specialty. I do my best to write accessibly to nonspecialists and avoid unnecessary jargon and technicalities. There are, of course, other approaches and points of view, but they are not my own.

My approach is evaluative and practical. It aims to understand, evaluate, and respond to the relevant facts from the point of view of living as we think we should now in our context. It is not an amateur venture into social science that aims to explain the economic, historical, political, psychological, or sociological conditions that give rise to human predicaments. Whatever the best social scientific explanation turns out to be, there is no reason why the approach I favor could not be consistent with it. The human predicaments I am concerned with have been familiar long before they were studied by social scientists. The particular problems to which they lead vary with contexts, but in one form or another they are recurrent features of human life. We know what our problems are. What we do not know is how we should understand, evaluate, and cope with them.

No one can have the last word on these difficult subjects. The particular forms in which the problems I will discuss now occur are part of how life now is for us. They are here to stay as long as our life and context are what they are. The best we can do is to understand, evaluate, and cope with them here and now as reasonably as we can. I offer a modest contribution to that.

2

Deep Conflicts

The Standard View

According to the standard view, we all have a more or less inarticulate view that guides how we think we should live. It is the joint product of the evaluative framework of our society, the modes of evaluation, and of our personal attitude. They form the background of our evaluations of the possibilities of life. The possibilities and our evaluations of them often conflict, and their conflicts reflect wider conflicts between the components of our personal attitude and the modes of evaluation of our evaluative framework. The result is that how we think we should live becomes a problem. It adds to the problem that both our evaluations and personal attitude are changing in response to new experiences and changing ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• A Note to the Reader
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Human Predicaments and Problems
• 2 Deep Conflicts
• 3 Difficult Choices
• 4 The Force of Fate
• 5 Fear of Meaninglessness
• 6 The Contingencies of Life
• 7 The Divided Self
• 8 The Complexities of Problems
• 9 Unavoidable Hypocrisy
• 10 The Miasma of Boredom
• 11 The Prevalence of Evil
• 12 The Danger of Innocence
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index