Standpoints E-Book

Svend Brinkmann

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 215

Beschreibung

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.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Preface

Prologue: The Meaningful Life

Meaning and instrumentalisation

The useful

Instrumental psychology and useless philosophy

The threat of nihilism

The structure of the book

Notes

1 The Good (Aristotle)

Eudaimonia and the virtues

Modern subjectivism

Notes

2 Dignity (Kant)

Value or dignity?

Dignity today

Notes

3 The Promise (Nietzsche)

The significance of the promise

The promise and guilt

Instrumentalised promises?

Notes

4 The Self (Kierkegaard)

The relation is constituted

Moral self-relation

Notes

5 Truth (Arendt)

The truth in an uncertain world

The dignity of truth

Notes

6 Responsibility (Løgstrup)

Where does the demand come from?

Ethics of the hand

Notes

7 Love (Murdoch)

The sovereignty of good

Something other than yourself

Love of self

Notes

8 Forgiveness (Derrida)

Love and the unforgivable

Forgiveness and asymmetric ethics

Notes

9 Freedom (Camus)

The tragic existentialist

Two concepts of freedom

On the instrumentalisation of freedom

Notes

10 Death (Montaigne)

To philosophise and die

The philosopher in the tower

We all die – so what?

Notes

Epilogue: Perspectives on the Meaning of Life

Dialectic of Enlightenment

Four perspectives on meaning

Welcome to the experience machine

Notes

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Begin Reading

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STANDPOINTS

10 Old Ideas in a New World

Svend Brinkmann

Translated by Tam McTurk

polity

First published in Danish as Ståsteder: 10 gamle ideer til en ny verden © Svend Brinkmann & Gyldendal, Copenhagen 2016. Published by agreement with Gyldendal Group Agency.

This English edition © Polity Press, 2018

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2376-4

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com

To my mother and father

Preface

It is up to the reader to decide whether Standpoints works on its own, as a follow-up to Stand Firm (2017), or as both. At any rate, the book began to take shape while I was working on a radio series in Denmark. Stand Firm was wilfully humorous and adopted a sceptical approach to a number of contemporary social trends, in particular the constant demands for personal development and flexibility. But it left unanswered questions. If we are to stand firm and not bend with the wind, on what is it worth standing firm? And, if doing our duty – instead of always just doing what is best for us and our self-development – has some form of intrinsic value, then of what does duty consist? Standpoints is an attempt to answer these questions in a more constructive and edifying manner than was possible in Stand Firm, while remaining true to my critique of contemporary culture.

I should like to thank my editor Anne Weinkouff, whose help has been invaluable throughout the writing process. Following up on the widespread and surprising popularity of Stand Firm – both in Denmark and abroad – was a slightly daunting task, and Anne has been wonderfully supportive throughout. I should also like to thank the Danish Broadcasting Corporation and the Rosenkjær Committee, in particular the Chair, Anders Kinch-Jensen, for awarding me the prestigious science communication prize in 2015. I have thoroughly enjoyed working with various people at the Corporation. Huge thanks are also due to Ester Holte Kofod, Mikka Nielsen, Rasmus Birk, Anders Petersen and Thomas Aastrup Rømer for reading the manuscript and providing extremely helpful feedback. I should also like to thank Louise Knight of Polity Press and Tam McTurk, the translator, for all of their hard and excellent work on the English-language version. However, as always, my biggest thanks go to my wife, Signe Winther Brinkmann, sine qua non.

The book is dedicated to my parents, from whom I derive most of the standpoints on which I, personally, choose to stand firm.

Randers, DenmarkMay 2017

Prologue: The Meaningful Life

In 2014, at a press conference for his film Magic in the Moonlight, Woody Allen spoke in his customary pithy manner about the meaning of life:

I firmly believe – and I don’t say this as a criticism – that life is meaningless. I’m not saying that one should opt to kill oneself. But the truth of the matter is, when you think of it, every 100 years, there’s a big flush, and everybody in the world is gone. And there’s a new group of people. And that gets flushed, and there’s a new group of people. And this goes on and on interminably – and I don’t want to upset you – toward no particular end, no rhyme or reason. And the universe, as you know from the best of physicists, is coming apart, and eventually there will be nothing, absolutely nothing. All the great works of Shakespeare, and Beethoven, and Da Vinci, all that will be gone. Now, not for a long time, but shorter than you think, really, because the Sun is going to burn out much earlier than the universe vanishes.1

As a result, Allen went on, he has no interest in making political films, because ‘while they do have current critical importance, in the large scheme of things, only the big questions matter, and the answers to those big questions are very, very depressing. What I would recommend – this is the solution that I’ve come up with – is distraction.’

The interview is full of the mixture of gravitas and humour for which Allen is so well known, but there is little doubt that he means what he says. And it is, of course, with a glint in his eye that the filmmaker extraordinaire recommends distractions – say, going to the cinema, for example – as a solution to life’s dismal lack of meaning. The question is, however, whether Allen is right. Is life really meaningless? To justify his conviction that life has no meaning, he draws on physics – arguably the most objective of scientific perspectives and one far removed from everyday human concerns. He talks of the Sun as a star that will burn out, and about the creation and ultimate destruction of the whole universe. If we remove ourselves completely from the hurly-burly of day-to-day life and adopt a cosmological view, it should come as no surprise that it is impossible to detect any meaning in life. Everything just becomes physical material in motion, which seems a tad depressing. The famous psychologist William James (1842–1910), who was widely credited with introducing psychology to the United States (and, incidentally, brother to the author Henry James), thought that the depression he suffered in his youth had been triggered by studying science, which had taught him that the universe lacks meaning and humankind lacks free will. James’ pragmatic solution was to choose to believe in free will and thus that individuals are capable of infusing their own lives with meaning. ‘My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will’, he wrote in his diary on 30 April 1870. James was convinced that this is what brought him out of his depression.

Not everyone possesses that level of mental fortitude. Most of us would shudder a little at Allen’s words. Most of us are probably incapable of bestowing meaning and freedom on ourselves and our lives simply by willing it to be so. Instead, we might question whether it is actually reasonable to seek meaning in a sphere so far removed from day-to-day life, as Allen appears to do. What happens if we step into life to explore it from the inside, instead of stepping out of it to view it from an astronomical distance? The answer is that meaning becomes less problematic than Allen claims. For example, Allen’s own words have meaning – whether or not we agree with them – and hopefully as a reader you will find this book quite meaningful. Perhaps meaning is a phenomenon only understood from the inside, and not from the outside, e.g. from the perspective of the physicist. After all, it goes without saying that the meaning of a poem is not grasped by weighing a poetry book or analysing the chemical composition of the ink on its pages.

So, in order to find meaning, we must delve into life rather than observe it from the outside. And what can we expect to find? My assertion is that we would, unfortunately, discover a lot of people who have difficulty defining the nature of meaning. The question seems to crop up more and more often these days – but answering it has probably never been more difficult. In material terms, we may be better off than ever before – we also live longer and treat illness and disease more effectively – but maybe many of us also lack meaning in our lives. The increasing frequency with which the question is asked, and the apparently never-ending stream of books on the subject, are not necessarily healthy signs. The very question itself – of the meaning of life – reflects an absence of something, a yearning. It is usually asked when people become aware of the lack of meaning in their lives. When our lives are busy – filled with family, friends, colleagues and all sorts of activity at work and in our spare time – the world seems loaded with significance and value. We rarely stop and ask ourselves whether it is ‘meaningful’ to make food for our kids, because making meals is, of course, an integral part of life. But when the normal pattern breaks down – when loved ones fall ill or die, or when restructuring or redundancies make our working lives difficult – we may find ourselves wondering about the meaning of it all. Why does whatever happens happen, and why do we do what we do? Is anything we do with our lives actually worthwhile?

Meaning and instrumentalisation

Other than adherents of fundamentalist creeds, most people find it impossible to come up with a definitive answer to the meaning of life. Nor does this book attempt to posit one. What it does offer is a suggestion for a direction that we might follow in order to relate to the question in a fruitful manner. In brief, the book’s thesis is that meaning is derived from phenomena that constitute an end in themselves, and from activities we indulge in for their own sake, rather than to achieve or obtain something. These phenomena can only be discovered from within life itself, not from the objectifying, astronomical distance suggested by Woody Allen.

In a conscious reference to my previous book, I have chosen to call phenomena that constitute ends in themselves ‘standpoints’. They provide something on which to stand firm in a world in constant flux. Admittedly, the idea that meaning is bound up with phenomena that constitute ends in themselves is a view that is under considerable pressure from a social process that might be called instrumentalisation. Instrumentalisation, more than anything else, has made grappling with the question of meaning far more difficult. The concept refers to things becoming instruments – means or tools to achieving something else – and not, therefore, being ends in themselves. Increasingly, it feels as if most of what we do has become a means to an end, rather than having intrinsic value. Money is perhaps the most obvious instrumental phenomenon. It is used to buy food, a home, transport, clothes, holidays and so on – it pervades every aspect of modern life – but money has no value in itself. Per se, money is, of course, just paper and metal or information stored on a computer in a bank. However, as an instrument, money is a universal means of exchange, which, in principle, makes it possible to value everything and to compare it with everything else. The advent of a money-based economy was almost magical. Suddenly, it became possible to weigh everything on the same set of scales. Today, it is possible, for example, to translate an hour of talk (with a psychologist, coach or accountant) into a portion of mince or Cliff Richard’s back catalogue. Money can be used to even out qualitative differences between objects and services and render all differences quantitative.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with instrumentalisation per se. Most of us would agree that using money is a better way to run our economy than a barter system, which would involve having to calculate how many apples correspond to a pair of shoes at any given point in time. In fact, most of us have a completely legitimate and somewhat instrumental relation to all sorts of things and activities – like sun cream and snow clearing. We do not apply sun cream because it is good per se to smear ourselves with it, but because we want to protect our skin against the Sun’s harmful rays. Nor do we clear snow just for the sake of it. We want to be able to navigate the pavements without slipping and to drive safely in the winter. Instrumental activities and relations are completely fine, not to mention unavoidable. However, the dividing line between an instrumental understanding of life and one that is more value-based is not always very clear. This book is not engaged in a utopian endeavour to wipe out instrumentalism, but it does try to identify the problems that arise if instrumentalist thinking is our first port of call – or even the dominant one – as we relate to the world, other people and ourselves. And this, I believe, is becoming the case today. Again, money is an obvious example: it is such an all-pervasive phenomenon in modern life, and regulates so many facets of it, that we have a tendency to forget that money is actually a means and not an end in itself. The fact that relatively affluent people who lack nothing are willing to work themselves half to death (or worse) to amass even greater wealth is, of course, an obvious sign that they have turned a means into an end. People act as if money has intrinsic value, but it does not. So, what does? What does constitute an end in itself? The premise of this book is that if we answer that question – not necessarily once and for all, but at least as part of an ongoing existential discussion – then we are closer to understanding that which gives meaning to life.

I forget the source, but I once heard the following definition of art (which is, of course, almost as difficult to define as the meaning of life): art is there to remind us that there are things that are an end in themselves. Art reminds us of this because it is not possible to reduce its purpose to anything else without eliminating what is artistic about art. We might say that art is there to provide positive and beautiful experiences, but that makes art little more than a delivery mechanism for unadulterated wellness – and, of course, not all art is beautiful or agreeable. Or we might argue that art has a political purpose, but then it becomes propaganda – and, of course, not all art is political. Art can, of course, be both beautiful and political, but neither of these are its purpose. They are, at best, secondary effects because, in my opinion, the sole purpose of art is to be art.

Art is far from being the only form of self-expression that constitutes an end in itself. The same is true for example of ethical actions, of play and of love. Everything – including art, ethics, play and love – can be made a tool for something other than itself, as we will see in this book. This is, in a sense, the opposite of turning a means (e.g. money) into an end in itself – but both endeavours stem from confusion about what has intrinsic value. For example, modern employers often instrumentalise play, making it a means of generating innovative ideas and facilitating the exercise of soft power.2 Something that used to belong solely to our free time has become a management tool to generate profit. It is, of course, an open question whether this is still play – because play can, by definition, be said to be free and not driven by another purpose. Can it be instrumentalised and still be play? We do not usually play to earn money or make a company competitive; we play to play. Otherwise these activities are not play at all, but work or profit maximisation. Profit maximisation is a legitimate endeavour, but can hardly be said to be an end in itself. I am not claiming that all instrumentalisation is odious or reprehensible – of course not. However, I would argue that it is now so all-pervasive that it threatens other ways of thinking that are far more fundamental to our ability to live well and meaningfully. Instrumentalisation can all too easily obscure that which is actually meaningful.

The useful

Instrumentalisation is an offshoot of utilitarianism. In modern society, we prefer to use the means or instruments that provide the best return – in other words, the ones that are the most useful. This is so ingrained in our culture that we are often blind to the pitfalls. Politicians in most countries have long sought to maximise the ‘bang for our buck’ – we want to get the most for our money, be it in health, environmental measures or education. Let us take education as an example. The idea of ‘maximum learning for our money’ often means that nurseries and schools opt for whatever educational practices have been proven, in meta-analyses of research results, to provide the best quantifiable return. Decision-makers minimise the significance of decades (even centuries) of tradition in child-rearing and teaching. The role of the teacher or nursery assistant is radically transformed from someone who exercises professional judgement to a conduit for the intentions of researchers and civil servants. It is also an approach that ignores the importance of local context (country, region, town, district, school year) in favour of a generalised insight into ‘what works’. In reality, of course, none of this actually ‘works’, because tradition, the individual involved and the context play far too great a role in all forms of education. The real problem is that we allow ourselves to believe that it works. The consequence of this is that we seek to reduce things that do have some kind of value per se – i.e. the content and wider historical and cultural context in which the field of education is necessarily rooted – to an instrument fine-tuned to achieve certain results in national tests and PISA rankings. It has become a goal in itself for pupils to achieve good test results for comparative purposes – even though these results are, at best, a means (of evaluating political targets) and never an end in themselves. What good is a high PISA ranking (the statistical value of which, incidentally, is highly debatable3) if it has only been achieved by pupils training specifically to take the test and sit exams, rather than immersing themselves in the subject in all its complexity? It transforms the means (tests and rankings) into an end per se, while the actual end (academic knowledge and a democratic mindset) falls by the wayside. Turning means into ends is one of the most damaging trends in modern society. In the eyes of the system, the value of childhood is reduced to churning out pupils who achieve the right results and preparing them to be ‘soldiers in the competition state’, as one political scientist put it.4 In other words, in our modern era, even childhood is subjected to instrumentalisation. It is merely a means to foster an effective and innovative workforce, so the nation can cope in a competitive global economy.

Instrumental psychology and useless philosophy

The utility value of the humanities is frequently discussed these days. In an instrumentalised and utilitarian era, humanities subjects face all kinds of challenges. What do history, drama studies or French do for GDP and national competitiveness? What use are they? One of the basic premises of this book is a paradox: namely that many disciplines – including the humanities – are of use precisely by virtue of their uselessness. In other words, it is more important than ever to show that there is more to life than what is ‘useful’. Accepting this is, therefore, useful in a deeper and more existential way. In this sense, art, play, love and ethics are at their most useful when they are useless – that is, when they do not serve any purpose, when they are ends in themselves. Following this line of argument, it is the supposedly useless phenomena that give life content and meaning. The humanities are important precisely because they deal with phenomena like art, ethics, etc.

I am a psychologist. Ours is a particularly interesting discipline because it has one foot in the humanities and the other in the natural sciences. Some aspects of psychology study human beings as creatures who act and suffer, who live in culture’s historical world of signs and symbols, while other aspects study human beings as physiological entities, as constructions of central nervous systems, genes and hormones that function according to the principle of cause and effect. On a personal level, I find both aspects fascinating and legitimate. However, since the book is concerned with meaning, the first set of phenomena are more important here.

The fact that the book centres around philosophy rather than psychology has to do with the fact that – more or less since its inception as a science in the late nineteenth century – psychology has unfortunately played a role in the process of social instrumentalisation. We might, in a slightly whimsical way, say that psychology has been the instrument of this instrumentalisation. It has been one of the most important means by which instrumentalisation has taken hold. What does this mean? It means, for example, that psychology, by dint of its cultural status as a modern ‘ersatz religion’, has offered individuals a range of tools that supposedly enable them to ‘work on themselves’.5 Psychology has transformed the religious goal of salvation into self-realisation; confession and pastoral care have become therapy and coaching; the modern secular priesthood consists of psychologists and self-help gurus; and God’s place at the centre of the cosmos has been usurped by the self. This has happened over the last couple of centuries. However, unlike the religious idea of the divine and the absolute as ends in themselves, psychology – to put it somewhat simply – offers means without ends. Or at least without ends other than those derived from the individual’s subjective self – or from national targets for ‘skills enhancement’. Psychology’s means range from psychotherapy, coaching, appreciative inquiry (AI), positive thinking, mindfulness and nonviolent communication (NVC) at the soft humanities end, to intelligence and personality tests at the hard natural science end. Many of these means have been incorporated