A friend sent me a cartoon this morning by email that showcased a familiar solution to the problem of absurdity. The panels of the strip depict a pig climbing onto a stump of "deep thoughts," whence he proceeds to contemplate the futility and hollowness of existence. We try to distract ourselves from it through seeking money and power, he observes, or through achieving immortality via the works we leave behind, or by losing ourselves in daily routines; but ultimately we confront the fact that all these things must end. And so must we. Thus, he decides at last, the best we can do is to laugh and love each other while we're here.
No doubt such a solution will seem satisfactory and familiar to many of us; it is the kind of humanism that gains ready and widespread assent in our present society. It strikes me, however, that it makes a couple logical leaps that may not be fully justified.
Positive psychology, after all, has identified at least five forms of wellbeing—not merely two—that can be cultivated through daily habits. Summed up under Seligman's acronym "PERMA," they are something like Positive feelings, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Achievement. By his conclusion on the stump, the pig seems to be saying that true meaning and consolation in life should be found only through R (as in the pig's "loving others") and P (as in the pig's closing advice to "laugh a lot").
This makes sense to people who value the P and R in their lives above all else; but upon further reflection, it's not really clear why these should necessarily be set above the other aspects of PERMA as life's ultimate ends. With his reflections on life's ephemerality, the pig implicitly impugns the long-term value of A (Achievement), which he dismisses as a distraction and a pursuit of the fleeting and unreal. (Omar Khayyam's "Worldly Hope" that in the end "turns ashes" or disappears.)
But if our big objection to A is that it does not last forever, the same could be said of all the other ingredients of PERMA too. Nothing gold can stay, as the poet observes, and this is as true in the cosmic sense of the positive feelings associated with relationships and laughter as of accomplishing tasks and meeting our personal goals. None will literally stick around long after our deaths.
Indeed, a distinct characteristic of all the ingredients of PERMA is that they are defined not by fixed binary states that are either attained or not attained, but rather they are habits that can be incorporated into a typical day. Within this framework, relationships are not more important, ultimate, or real, than achievement, so long as we understand that achievement is not a final state to be switched on (one does not one day become "a success," for there is no such thing) but a daily practice of setting and achieving self-directed goals.
Since all five forms of wellbeing take place within the course of a limited time period, meanwhile, and eventually cease with the death of the individual, we could just as easily reverse the pig's formula, and say that R and P are the false gods—the ultimately insubstantial things that people waste their lives pursuing, only to lose them and see them amount to dust and ashes in the end. As Proust once put it, as quoted in Edmund White's short book on the author: "The artist who renounces one hour of work for an hour of chatting with a friend knows that he has sacrificed a reality for something that doesn't exist."
He would certainly dispute the pig's characterization of R and P as the only things we have left in the end. To the contrary, the French novelist implicitly declares, it is the E, M, and A found in artistic production that will have lasting value.
And both of these contradictory observations are able to have the ring of truth precisely because, in actual fact, the human animal needs all five: P, E, R, M, and A. If we are in a mood in which we feel starved of one or the other of these, and someone comes along and says "the true meaning of life is [whichever one of the five we are currently missing]", then of course that will sound very plausible in the moment. That does not make it so.
But suppose we conclude from all this not that we need the full menu of PERMA in our lives, but rather that our arguments have simply proven the unreality and insubstantiality of the entire package. Aldous Huxley, for one, would make little distinction in value between seeking to attain a sense of peace and fulfillment through pursuing pleasure or P (what he would call "downward self-transcendence") or through cultivating daily habits of service and achievement, i.e. A (he would dub this "horizontal self-transcendence").
All, he would say, are vain attempts to escape the self, for they do not touch the real thing, the big kahuna—namely: "vertical self-transcendence," that which escapes the self through direct contact with the ultimate Other, eternity, the ground of all being.
Whatever truth to this there may be, though (and I lack the religious experience of the numinous on which many people found their claims to vertical self-transcendence, so I'm not in a position to judge), it seems to me that we need not necessarily resort to it.
After all, the big objection to the ingredients of PERMA, as we saw above, is that they do not last forever. They are here an hour and then gone. "Accomplishment"? You can't take it to the grave with you, as the pig says in so many words. Loved ones? They will remember you for a time, but then they too must perish. "Engagement"? After you've created your great creative work, what then? What's next?
But there is a logical step being made here that we don't need to follow. After all, what is the fact that something doesn't last forever supposed to prove?
Why is it again that we think something is less real just because it doesn't last forever? Why does the ephemerality of an experience diminish its truth or reality? And how can we regard anything as truly temporary in a universe that exists—and shall always exist—in four dimensions, even if we humans can only see one of those dimensions from one direction? Can we not, in such a universe, take Spinoza's advice, step back mentally from this perspective, and regard all positive and enriching human experiences under a species of eternity?
This, I take it, is what Archibald MacLeish is urging us to do, in his poem "The Snowflake Which is Now and Hence Forever." He imagines the poet asking if a given masterpiece will last forever. But then, he asks, is forever really the goal? Is immortality the key to meaning? Or, does the poem have value simply in existing when it did, for the limited time it did? He compares the poem to a salmon and asks: is the fate of the one that lasts, cooked on a slab, to be preferred to the one that leaps glinting in the sun, if only for a moment, then disappears under the water, never to be seen again?
They also live, he concludes, Who swerve and vanish in the river.
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