Agnes Callard on Meaning, the Human Quest, and the Aims of Education

Agnes Callard: Thank you.

Agnes Callard: Well, there’s a lot of different senses in which we care about the future. So, we care about our own futures–right?–the rest of our lives. We care about our children’s futures, the kinds of lives they’re going to get to live. But I was specifically interested in the future that we won’t participate in. So, if this address had had a title, which they don’t have because it’s just called the ‘Aims of Education Address,’ it would have been titled: ‘The Years 2200 to 5000.’ And I picked those times because, you know, by 2200, anyone I know, anyone I’ve really interacted with or kind of directly influenced will be dead. And, 5000 is about as far as I can think into the future and still feel like I’m thinking about people I could recognize. I think that’s probably a function of the fact that the people that I work on in the past are about 2,500 years ago.

So, if I can say, ‘Okay, think about people as far ahead in the future as Socrates was for me in the past,’ if I try to go further than that, I’m not sure I’m actually thinking about the people. I think I might be just saying a number to myself.

So, that’s the future that I’m interested in talking about, which is a future that even our grandchildren won’t get to see. And, I think we care about that future. And that’s a harder claim to make than the claim that we care about our personal future or the futures of our children.

Agnes Callard: That’s right. I think that your interest in them isn’t contingent on your biological connection to them. That is, even if somehow you knew that your grandchildren weren’t going to have children, you’d still have an interest in these people.

Agnes Callard: Yeah. So, I didn’t come up with this. I’m borrowing it from Sam Scheffler, his book–

Agnes Callard: What we owe the future, right? I think, in a way, he came up with it as a thought experiment. Though as a scenario in fiction, it predates him. So, the idea is, suppose that we found out that there was just a virus–like, in addition to COVID, there was another virus that had been infecting all of us, everyone around the whole world, over the past few months. And, by the time we find out that this virus has infected literally everyone, only then do we learn that it makes you sterile. So, what we learn is that there just won’t be any more human beings after us. That is like, the youngest baby that was just born, that’s the last human. And, that’s it.

So, what we are facing, then, is human extinction, but in a form that’s not very violent and doesn’t in and of itself bring with it of great suffering. So, it’s not like a comet hits the Earth, it’s not like a disease that is going to cause lots of pain. It’s just that it’s going to stop. And, the question that Scheffler wants you to ask yourself is: how do you feel about that? How would you feel if you learned that the last humans had just been born? That’s the thought experiment.

Agnes Callard: That’s great.

Agnes Callard: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, Scheffler makes reference to them. So, there’s a book by P.D. James, Children of Men, and then there’s a great movie from 2006 with Clive Owen by Alfonso Cuarón called Children of Men that’s a movie version of the book, though it changes many things in the book. They’re both really good. Scheffler and Cuarón and P.D. James each have slightly different ways of presenting what the world turns into once everybody knows that the last humans have been born.

But, something they have in common is the sort of conceit that it would cause a widespread despair, apathy, and kind of erosion of all social institutions–of trust, of any sense that life had a meaning, that there’s a reason to do anything, that there’s a reason to behave morally and respectfully towards one another. All three of those people–that is both the philosopher, the filmmaker, and the novelist–seem to agree that this knowledge would be devastating to us, even though it wouldn’t be a knowledge that you’re going to die any sooner than you would’ve and it wouldn’t be a knowledge that anyone you know is going to experience great suffering. So, it’s surprising that this knowledge would be so devastating.

Agnes Callard: I’m not sure I feel confident about it as a prediction of what would actually happen. But, I think it’s better maybe not to think of it as a prediction, but to think of it as a way of dramatizing and making visual the surprising feeling of panic that we feel at the thought of, ‘What if I’m the last generation?’

So, what would actually happen? Well, I mean maybe we would turn to cloning and we would throw so much effort into cloning that even if we never achieved cloning, that would motivate us. Right? Maybe we would invent some kind of drug, and that we’d all just take a lot of drugs, and pass the time in this kind of drugged state, and be, in some sense, actually more ready to be dependent on social institutions and not try to overthrow them. So, I actually think there’s probably a wide variety of possibilities.

But, the thing that seems very real to me, that all three of these authors capture, is that there really is this feeling of despair or the pit of your stomach falling at the thought of: There’s no more humans. I love the version of it that you just gave, of the last old woman. I mean according to say, Cuarón and James, it wouldn’t be like an old woman because people wouldn’t even reach old age at that point because there’d be so much–the old people would, in some sense–the social situations wouldn’t conduce to longevity for anyone. But, the loneliness of that last person trying to go through any emotions of life, I think that’s in a way as good an image as the society falling apart that you get in the novel and the movie of what this despair is.

Agnes Callard: So, I think the two really plausible, in some sense, lines of response to the thought of things would totally fall apart is–you’ve given both of them–one of them is cloning. At a social level or a group level, we would try to fight this, but that would require coordinated effort, and at certain point, that would become clearly impossible. And, then the other thing is preservation and the thought that like, ‘Well, there’s likely to be life out there that’s not human life.’ There might be ways we can take reasonable steps towards the preservation of some of our most important cultural artifacts.

Those are some actions that might still make sense to you. Not sure what else would still make sense to a person. Even Scheffler give this list, and one of them is even something–obviously it wouldn’t make sense to be looking for the cure to cancer, but even something like reading Catcher in the Rye, it’s one of his examples. He’s like, ‘Would you sit there and read Catcher in the Rye? Would it feel meaningful to you to read a novel? I don’t know the answer, but I’m sort of inclined to find it somewhat plausible that it wouldn’t.

Agnes Callard: Okay. I’m inclined to respond by thinking about an observation that I made. Like, when I was in grad school, I noticed that at a certain point of grad school, people start to feel this itch to get out of grad school. At least part of it is, they’re just sick of being a wheel turning nothing. And, in a certain way, grad school is the best time of your life, especially if you have lots of funding and don’t have to teach, and you can just read books, and learn and profit from all the intellectual fruits that are present at a university. I spent 10 years in grad school, and if I hadn’t been pushed, I might have just spent longer there. I loved it. But, I had a kid in grad school, and I think that helped, feeling like I wasn’t a wheel turning nothing. I think that they might–it’s like you can just sit and read Shakespeare, but do you want to?

There’s a way in which these, let’s say, certain recreational intellectual pursuits might make sense to us within the context of a life that is anchored in a bigger story. It might make less sense once we sort of decouple it from that. There’s a lot of pressure to make your own meaning as a grad student. I think that that’s genuinely hard. And, that’s, in a way, what it will be. It would be more like being that grad student with tons of funding than it would be like being me now.

Agnes Callard: So, Kieran’s getting that–I read his book, too–he’s getting that distinction from Aristotle. But, Aristotle would not call those activities atelic.

So, this is like Aristotle’s distinction between an energeia, which is an activity, versus a kinesis, which is a movement that arrives at an end. Something like an energeia–he gives an example of seeing. Seeing is an energeia, but also enjoying something, pleasures, whatever. They’re completed at every moment. So, it’s not that they don’t have an end. It’s just that they achieve the end at every moment that you’re doing them. And so, you don’t have to wait awhile and then get the end. You’re getting it all along the way. Right?

An, that’s important, because some things are just pointless. And, those would be atelic, right? They would have no end at all. They would have no goal, no value. Aristotle certainly thinks that these activities, energeia, have a goal. It’s just the goal is in themselves rather than external to them.

Agnes Callard: But, Aristotle also observes in this very discussion of energeia–in which he’s explaining this fact about energeia, somewhere in the context of it–he talks about how, often if you’re trying to do one activity, one energeia, it gets in the way of doing another. These can compete. Right? And, he says people who eat candies and things at the theater, those people are clearly not really enjoying the theater because it’s like they’re trying to do two competing activities at the same time. Right?

So, the question is not: Would reading Catcher in the Rye be an energeia? But, would it be an energeia for you under these circumstances? That is: Would you be so distracted? In some sense, what are the background conditions that are required for you to engage in an activity and have it be completed every moment? And it’s just not obvious to me that the background conditions would be there for many of us to be reading novels under these circumstances.

Agnes Callard: I think that might be right if you knew you only had to do it for maybe an hour.

Agnes Callard: Part of what James and Cuarón are exploring is, like, what about the years–the months and the years–of this knowledge weighing on you? There’s almost a sense in which you can put it on pause for an hour, I think. So, yeah, I think that’s somewhat plausible to me. But, that doesn’t mean you wouldn’t feel that despair. It just means maybe you could set it aside to watch the sunset.

Agnes Callard: Right. So, in a way, the whole thrust of Scheffler’s book is: Our own deaths don’t have this effect on us. They don’t induce in us this sense of despair over the meaninglessness of everything that we’re doing. And yet, if he’s right about future generations, the deaths of people–not the deaths, the non-births of people that we’ll never meet do induce that in us. So, part of Scheffler’s theory about this is that human life has, like, a natural shape: that we have an understanding of it as having certain stages, in effect. Right? And, we are reconciled to and accept it as that.

And, part of what it is to having meaning–this is something I don’t discuss in the talk–but part of what it is for things to have meaning for us is for them to be situated in that framework. So, we have, like, a framework for understanding our lives, and it includes death.

But, part of our framework for understanding our lives and the meaning of the things in those death-bounded lives is the idea that future generations are going to continue. So, for him, in a way, his starting point is that there is this asymmetry between finding meaning within your own life, given death, and finding meaning within your own life, given non-births of future people.

Agnes Callard: Yeah. So, his answer is just that many of our meaning-creating activities are conditional on their being continued or developed in the future.

So, I’m, in effect, counting on future people for the meaning of my life. The future people need to be involved in projects like mine.

And, on the assumption that they are, then the things I’m doing retain their value.

The analogy he uses that I find useful is that, like, we think of it as a party that we had to leave early. And, as long as the party keeps going, we’re okay with the fact that we had to leave early. But we’re not okay with the party ending.

Agnes Callard: Right.

So, I think that–I mean, what Scheffler is basically saying is that, it’s just a kind of brute fact that you can only get meaning from doing something if you think that there are future people who are going to, in some sense, continue that broader project.

And, I think the problem with that is that it would make human meaning into a pyramid scheme.

Like, the meaning of my life will depend on the meaning of the future generations, but their lives wouldn’t have meaning unless there were yet further future generations. And, that will just keep going forever. But it can’t keep going forever because we know there won’t always be future generations.

So, that’s a kind of cosmic fact, right? Similar to the fact that we ourselves are going to die, life will eventually end. All life, not just human life.

And so, it better not be the case that for any given generation, the meaning of their lives depends on the existence of future generations. Because then, in effect, by just a chain of backwards reasoning, no matter how long this chain is, we can learn our lives actually don’t have meaning.

Agnes Callard: Right. As I see it, there are two possible ways to go, at that point.

One would be to say, ‘Look, the ant colony activity is just inherently meaningful, and so we can get meaning from our lives.’ This is like your sunset example. It’s also Kieran’s approach. Right? Which is just: We can have the meaning now.

And I think that’s, to some extent, true. I think there’s something to be said for that response. That’s the response that Scheffler is trying to resist. He’s trying to introduce a level of dependence on the future generations. Right? That wouldn’t be the case if you say we can have the meaning now.

So, I think we can have some of the meaning now, but I do think that there is some dependence. And, I think that if you think there is some dependence, then you have to, in effect–we can put it in terms of Kieran’s distinction–you had better think this process is telic and not atelic. That is atelic in the bad sense, in the sense of having no goal at all. You better think we’re going somewhere, and we will–there’s such a thing as having gotten there.

So, I think to the extent that Scheffler is right that we’re dependent upon future generations, that will be because there’s a project that we’ve done part of that we want them to continue.

Agnes Callard: So, the first thing is, maybe to frame it in terms of–I think the question of how would religion fit into this is a great question actually and–

Agnes Callard: Yeah. Well, it reminds me of something, which is, like: someone like Socrates, he was not very worried about this future generation’s problem. It doesn’t show up. But, he believed in reincarnation, which would be sort of similar; and he believed that you could continue doing your projects in the afterlife. Right? So, if you, in effect, don’t–there are ways to avoid some of these physical constraints; and then you have new, argumentative, new avenues for development. So, if you can be reincarnated and if you can continue doing your project–which for Socrates was inquiry–after your death, in the underworld, then you less depend on future generations. Right?

So, I think that that’s really right. In a way, a lot of different kind of religious theories are grappling with this question–of how can our lives have meaning in the face not only of our own deaths, but in the face of perhaps the death of our way of life, or of our people, of our group, and then it could be of all humanity. These are all different stages. Right?

So, I think it’s sort of right to situate it in that broader framework and say: Scheffler is approaching this question that a lot of religions have approached with all of their metaphysical resources without sort of saying, ‘Suppose we didn’t have any of those resources. Then, how could we think about it?’

But, I think the opera singer–so I have musicians in my family, and they are very depressed by the decline of the interest in classical music among young people. It really matters to them that people in the future be listening to, going to music. They want the people that show up at concerts–like, they really care that young people show up at concerts. That’s a thing they genuinely care about. Where I first find that, I’m like, ‘Well, who cares who shows up to your concerts?’ No, because they’re invested in this thing and they want it to continue. They don’t just want it to die out. So, I suspect that would be true of the opera singer, too.

Agnes Callard: But, my thought was slightly broader, which is to say, if we think of all the stuff we’re doing, including opera, as experiments in living–we’re trying to figure out good ways to live–and we think we have come up with some. Like, presumably, opera singer thinks opera’s one of them, classical music. But, we’re also coming up with more of them. And we want that project to continue. And, it may well be that the opera singer can’t quite foresee what opera could turn into. In some ways, some of what the energy behind opera turned into things like musicals and pop music, and that’s been a way in which we developed certain kinds of–like, certain kinds of new artistic forms would come to be born out of old artistic forms. And, I think that’s still pretty satisfying.

Agnes Callard: I agree. But, also, like, I think it’s interesting which examples we pick for that. That is, I think it would sort of be a tragedy if–like, take The Beatles song “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” which is a song I like a lot. And I’m like, if that were never played again, would that be a tragedy? In a way, yeah, it would be a loss, but I don’t have that immediate feeling as I do about Beethoven’s Ninth. And, I’m not sure it’s because I think Beethoven’s Ninth is so much better than that song. It probably is better. But, I think it’s also that Beethoven is held up as–he is, himself, a kind of romantic ideal that symbolizes what we want to preserve from the past. Shakespeare would be another example, right?

Agnes Callard: And, this is actually part of how we hold onto culture, is that we have symbols of culture itself, and Beethoven is one of those symbols.

So, it makes sense that we don’t have this visceral emotional response. Right?

But, I do think we’ve lost a ton of stuff from the past. We lost so many Socratic dialogues of people written other than Plato. We’ve lost Greek Tragedy. We’ve lost bits of Aristotle. We should be crying all the time of all–those are just the famous people we lost. What about the people who we don’t even know about that existed? We’ve lost a ton of great stuff that we don’t know about. And, yes, there’s reason to be sad about that, but I think the reason to be sad about non-continuation is, like, one level deeper than that.

Agnes Callard: So, you know what that reminds me of? Nietzsche’s theory of eternal recurrence.

Agnes Callard: So, he’s not–it’s [?] that, like, everything that’s happened is just going to happen again in an infinite number of times, and you should, in some sense, pick your life under that conceit. Right? Like: Live the life you’d be willing to live infinity times into the future because that thought of the stuff from the past is just coming back.

I think that’s a different answer–like, if we thought that. In some sense, maybe you could even think of Nietzche’s theory of eternal recurrence as his solution to this problem–which I hadn’t thought about it that way before. So, you’re right that that is an alternative.

And, I think that it’s a version of Kieran’s answer. I mean it’s a version of the energeia–completed in and of itself answer–which is to say that, you know, like, all the stuff in the past is coming back.

But, the important point is that at any given moment, the process of picking up and putting down has its own internal completeness, because there’s nothing outside of it. There’s nothing outside the procession, seems to me the really important line in that quote.

So, that is one of the answers. And you could maybe give support to that answer, that kind of, like, energeia, internally complete sort of answer, through the idea of eternal recurrence.

Agnes Callard: Yeah, yeah.

Agnes Callard: Yeah. So I, basically, want a different solution from Scheffler’s because I think his solution has the pyramid scheme problem and I want a different solution from Kieran’s or Stoppard’s or Nietzsche’s, which is the kind of internally complete solution.

And, for me, the kind of first step is just to notice that the feeling that I have about humanity ending, it doesn’t feel like me thinking about my death. It feels like me thinking about my premature death. That is, when I think about my death, I’m like, ‘Okay, eventually I’m going to die. I’m sort of okay with that.’ But, when I think about dying before I get certain things done that I want to get done, that feels sort of terrifying to me. It has a distinctive form of terror, a distinctive form of existential panic. Like, I need to get those things done, they’re really important. [More to come, 37:55]