Is Life Worth Living? – a Parlor Game
In The Myth of
Sisyphus, Camus famously asserted that “There is but one
truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life
is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of
philosophy.”[1]
My idea is slightly different. I think the question of suicide is a bit of a diversion
since there can be all sorts of reasons to stay alive, once one is already
alive, that have little to do with one’s overall assessment of life’s value …
beginning with simple fear of death or dying, but including also obligations to
or caring about others and, for many, insufficient pain or angst to want to
bother ending it.
I have come up with a kind of parlor game to tease out our true opinion of life no matter how happy and content a person may appear to be. Unlike me, most of my friends do not spend their lives struggling to get to the pith of things. Of course this could be why they appear to be happy or content, and for two different kinds of reason: They may be blind to the reality, or they may really be happy because it is precisely the “struggle to get to the pith of things” that produces unhappiness, much like an electron microscope changes what it reveals. This is why a “game” is so helpful: It is perhaps “light” enough a process to reveal without altering what it reveals.
So let me
play it with you right now. Simply ask
yourself whether you would like to, or mind being, born again or reincarnated.
Well, not so simple; but I think I can make it reasonable enough with a few
clarifications. Thus, I am not asking the metaphysically fraught question, “Do
you wish you had never been born?” Besides being difficult to wrap one’s mind
around, the question is too particular to the circumstances of one’s own actual
life, whereas I am now looking for a broader assessment of human existence as a
whole.
So in considering your attitude toward the prospect of
rebirth, what I have in mind is this. You are to imagine that you might be
reborn as anyone whomsoever, in any era, past or future (though you are also
free to limit some of this vast scope as being simply beyond the realm of
conceivability; so perhaps it would be better to say, anyone whomsoever in past
or present and near-future, or even just present. Let us also exclude other
animals, although they are a common feature of Hindu reincarnation). So next
time around you might be rich or poor, hale or sickly, generally happy or
melancholy or tortured, English or Chinese, even male or female or
hermaphroditic, etc.[2] But it is not up to you which it will be; that
is determined by chance.
Considered thus, I know that my own answer to the question,
“Would you like to be reborn?” would be an emphatic “No!” My intuition is still
no doubt heavily colored by my feelings about my own actual life. But it also
seems to me as close to an objective assessment of human life as a whole that
one would be able to make. Just considering the statistical odds of ending up
in dire straits of one kind or another might be enough to reach this
conclusion. But even assuming non-dire straits for the mass of humanity, I see
little enough in human existence to entice me to go through it all over again.
Just think about it! And remember – this, a fine point made by one of the
game’s beta-testers – even if you presently felt gung-ho to be reborn into a
whole new world to explore no matter what your personal circumstances would be,
the “you” who is reborn might very well not have such an attitude and might instead
experience her life as pure hell, indeed, even if an otherwise wonderful life
(like mine).
Nietzsche posed a similar challenge to mine with his notion of an eternal return. Meanwhile, the Buddha and most Buddhists – and unlike the typical New Ager -- agree with my assessment and seek precisely to avoid reincarnation (although there are Buddhist saints or bodhisattvas who put off Nirvana until they have helped everyone else reach that state of non-being). Nevertheless there are also people who say “Yes!” to life no matter what. So I will acknowledge that it is really a digression for me to be trying to “make the case” for life’s awfulness. I can only properly speak about myself (and even that, of course, with knowledge that is very partial, in both senses). For me life is painful – not so painful that I will end it, so long as things continue to go along as relatively smoothly as they are going now, but painful enough that I would wish it on no one, and certainly not want to repeat it. Furthermore, my knowledge and reflections have convinced me that no other human life (or at any rate very few) would make me desire theirs either; thus my answer in the parlor game. And I would predict most players would answer the same.
There are further complications, but also interesting
implications, of this thought experiment. For instance, there may after all be
a contamination of the question by thinking of it as a case of being reborn.
For suppose one’s attitude toward the value of living a human life were “It’s
good, but once is enough”; then one might refuse the offer to be reborn, and
yet this would not be an indicator that one did not think life worth living. On
the other hand, there is paradox here, since even though reborn, one would
experience life as if for the first time; so if one did truly find life worth
living albeit only once, then why not be reborn into a new life that would seem
to be one’s one and only life? Indeed it may be paradoxical to imagine oneself
being reborn at all if the person who is “reborn” has no recollection of having
been “you” and may be utterly different besides. Nevertheless, I find that no more
problematic than deciding whether it is the same person after amnesia, or
during dementia, or even between infancy and maturity.[3]
But I wonder also about how one’s answer to the question
would stand up to one’s thoughts and feelings about having children. Suppose
one decidedly rejected being reborn; would this mean one would reject bringing
children into this world? I suspect the answer is “No.” I doubt that our reason
for bringing children into the world has much to do with a consideration of the
value of life. People bring children into the world for themselves, not for the
children! (Although once here, of course, we may devote ourselves to their
welfare.) Indeed, I am sure many parents see children as a way to boost the
value of their own life; certainly many of us would feel our life much
diminished without children. But as for whether we have done them a favor by
bringing them into being … well, that can now be seen not only to pose a
question, but to raise a moral issue.[4] There is also the question of to what degree in
bringing a child into the world we are in a way being reborn ourselves, since
childbearing is indeed our genome’s way of persisting; in which case, wanting
children but not wanting to be reborn may appear paradoxical.
So you can see that however philosophical this thought experiment may be, it would certainly make a good parlor game!
[1] Camus then labeled all other philosophical questions “games”: “All the rest — whether or not the world has three dimensions,
whether the mind has nine or twelve categories — comes afterwards. These are
games; one must first answer [the question about suicide].” I am doing Camus
one better by turning his question into a game too.
[2] In effect I am adapting
a thought experiment used by John Rawls in A
Theory of Justice, but in such
a way as to remove some of its problematic features.
[3] We
do, from an “outsider’s" perspective, speak of a demented person as “no longer
being themself.” So test your intuition about another hypothetical case: If you
believed you were going to be put to sleep and then permanently deprived of
your memory of who you were, and that upon awakening that person, having no
idea who he is or was, would immediately be dumped into a vat of boiling oil,
would you feel terror or anxiety at the prospect on your own behalf, or only concern
on behalf of some stranger?
[4] Cf.
David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The
Harm of Coming into Existence (Oxford University Press, 2006).