I have always had a distant image of philosopher David Benatar as having a lot to contend with in a difficult place at a difficult time. The idea of his that I examine here was one I chanced upon. It is the idea that human life is so miserable, that it is immoral to bring people into it in the first place!
It has received the title of Anti-Natalism.
It consists of a simple logicking on the initial proposition ‘Life is miserable’. It fulfils one of the meanings of ‘abstraction’ that I have. It abstracts the concept ‘Life is miserable’ and then does logical and even mathematical thinking on it. It lacks any intervening sensibility to human life. It is abstracted from human life. It could be done by a schoolboy who is precocious at mental arithmetic and at solvong puzzles.
I am sorry to use such extreme words. The whole of Philosophy lacks it. It is an enormous lack. I have detailed it here. Benatar boils human life down till it isn’t human life anymore and then does logicking with it.
He sees life’s experiences as ones of pleasure or of pain; then observe that the balance in many people’s lives is one of pain; therefore it wasn’t right to bring them into the world in the first place. QED, as our old geometry bokoks used to say.
DB makes another point: While the balance in some people’s lives may be one of pleasure, it wouldn’t be bad if they too had never been born, because then they wouldn’t be around to notice what they had missed! You see? QED! This thinking applies to all sentient life, not just the human.
As for those of us who insist our lives aren’t so bad, and who therefore continue to have children and not commit suicide, we are just kidding ourselves, says DB. This comes firstly by having a mistakenly rosy view of our lives; secondly, by lowering our expectations of life; and thirdly, by comparing our lives to people even worse off. DB says that these psychological tendencies encourage the survival and reproduction of the human race.
Also, writes DB: once you are born, suicide is not always the right thing to do, because people have come to depend on you.
He has extended his thoughts, it seems, into two books, spelling out all the logical steps after his initial postulate ‘Life is miserable’. This logicking is sometimes tabulated, so it comes close to looking mathematical.
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If people are going to write words on life and death, here I think are some examples of how they should do it. Here is an excerpt from The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins in 1859, which sticks in my memory:
‘These thoughts came to me, and others with them, which drew my mind away to the little Cumberland churchyard where Anne Catherick lay buried. I thought of the bygone days when I had met her by Mrs. Fairlie’s grave, and met her for the last time. I thought of the poor helpless hands beating on the tombstone, and her weary, yearning words, murmured to the dead remains of her protectress and her friend: ‘Oh, if I could die, and be hidden and at rest with you!’ Little more than a year had passed since she breathed that wish; and how inscrutably, how awfully, it had been fulfilled! The words she had spoken to Laura by the shores of the lake, the very words had now come true. ‘Oh, if I could only be buried with your mother! If I could only wake at her side when the angel’s trumpet sounds and the graves give up their dead at the resurrection!’ Through what mortal crime and horror, through what darkest windings of the way down to death, the lost creature had wandered in God’s leading to the last home that, living, she never hoped to reach! In that sacred rest I leave her – in that dread companionship let her remain undisturbed.’
Also just think how George Eliot in the last pages of The Mill on the Floss deals with the drowning of Maggie Tulliver and her brother, clinging together in the flood of the Lincolnshire river. I can only give here the last lines of the penultimate chapter:
‘The boat re-appeared — but brother and sister had gone down in an embrace never to be parted – living through again in one supreme moment, the days when they had clasped their little hands in love, and roamed the daisied fields together.’
(Alright, a little mawkish when taken out of context.)
And look at this from Tom Brown’s School Days, not exactly recognized as one of the great or seminal works of Victorian literature, probably still laughed at for its muscular Christianity. It concerns Tom Brown himself, when saddled with the responsibility for his own good of looking after and protecting Arthur, a frail new boy at Rugby School in the 1830s (where the boys were given weak beer to drink at breakfast, lunch and tea):
‘This increased his consciousness of responsibility; and though he hadn’t reasoned it out and made it clear to himself, yet somehow he knew that this responsibility, this trust which he had taken on himself without thinking about it, head over heels in fact, was the centre and turning point of his school life, that which was to make him or mar him, his appointed work and trial for the time being. And Tom was becoming a new boy, though with frequent tumbles in the dirt and perpetual hard battle with himself, and was daily growing in manfulness and thoughtfulness, as every high-couraged and well-principled boy must, when he finds himself for the first time consciously at grips with self and devil.’
Some pages earlier, Arthur (the frail new boy) had knelt down by his bed before lights out to say his prayers, to the jeering of the other boys. But Tom Brown and Harry East are soon following his example, and then so do some other boys.
OK, so Tom Brown isn’t great but it’s one of the excerpts I had to hand. Better to dip anywhere into Jonathan Swift, Anthony Trollope, D.H. Lawrence, or Jane Austen and many others of the 19th century. Jane Austen’s little chestnut, ‘A very narrow income has a tendency to contract the mind and sour the temper’ is already of a different order and far above anything written by Socrates and other philosophers, on human life.
[The fictional excerpts I have given above are laced through with Christianity because they were novels of the 19th century. One could still write profoundly about the lives of human beings on Earth without bringing God into it, but modern novelists after about 1930 don’t. They are smart contemporaries writing about ‘issues’ and stopping short of saying anything worth reading that I can’t get in the newspapers. What happened? I don’t think disbelief in God should necessarily lead to this secular trivialization of life and death. It didn’t in D. H. Lawrence’s case for example. (Anyway, even conventional religion is better than Philosophy when it comes to Wisdom.)]
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Compare the above fictional excerpts to David Benatar’s categorizing of human experiences under columns for pain or pleasure, adding them up, averaging them out to see whether one has had an overall painful or pleasurable life; and logicking to further conclusions with the help of some diagrams.
For me this is the mentality of the clever schoolboy and of the philosopher. I’m sorry to be rude but it’s part of my general state of being appalled by Philosophy (here, here, here, and here).
Philosophy, ever since it started in 580 BC, has been an expression of minds that lack that special intelligence and capacity for understanding that human beings have been blessed with. They either lack it or leave it disregarded and fallow. Logic, mathematics and science are presently and historically the extent to which philosophers’ minds work. They inevitably have a facile understanding of the life of the self, and then use this facile understanding as a basis for step-by-step logicking into abstractions which impress people as Wisdom on human life. That certain something of human intelligence that philosophers lack (and no-one can encompass everything) hasn’t even got a name and is considered to fall outside Reason and Rationality. ‘Sensibility to the concrete wholeness of human life’ is a borrowed term, but is the best I can offer at the moment
DB himself hadn’t committed suicide up to the time he was writing these posts, and (on the grounds that he was ‘a very private person’) refused to tell us whether he had begotten children.
It is relevant to know this latter unknown fact because it would indicate whether he himself takes seriously his own views for his own life, or whether they are just part of his professional logicking. Despite the despair of his philosophizing, his photographs show him in a high state of good humour.
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I may have got details of DB’s argument wrong, but I feel I’m pretty close. It’s the frame of mind I am interested in.
DB has called the fact that there is more pain than pleasure in life a ‘Crucial Asymmetry’! And his idea as a whole is called ‘Anti-Natalism’ by other philosophers! Those are the kinds of words Philosophers use.
One of DB’s books is called The Human Predicament: A Candid Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions, which sounds as if he deals in like manner with the other great questions of life. I saw in passing that another modern philosopher has written a book on Meaning and Meaninglessness in Human Life, which sounds a similar project. Oi! They were published by great publishing houses and translated into many languages.
The simple-mindedness about human affairs that those destined to be philosophers have, leaves them with naked logic to deal with human affairs. This simple-mindedness is otherwise known as rationalism. For example: ‘human life is unpleasant, therefore lets not be born! QED.’ This position is then called Anti-Natalism! I’m always reminded, see here, of the lady who turned to me in a Philosophy tutorial and said: ‘This isn’t education’.
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