Owen Flanagan 2007 The Really Hard Problem – Meaning in a Material World. Cambridge Massachusetts: MIT Press.
Owen Flanagan1 is a naturalist – he believes that we are nothing but
animals living in a material world free of any supernatural dimension –
and he is not afraid to tackle the big questions. His overarching
project appears to be consolatory: that denying God and the
supernatural does not result in a world devoid of meaning, mystery or
magic. He is strongly attracted to Buddhism, particularly Tibetan, and
that combination of materialism and Buddhism is what attracted me to
this book, even if only to see how the other (materialist) half lives.
His book asks the question: how can we live lives which are genuinely
meaningful in a material world? He calls this work ‘Project
Eudaimonia’, eudaimonia from the Greek meaning ‘happy spirit’ or as
Flanagan translates it, ‘flourishing’. His contention is that this
flourishing is empirically based and should be subject to empirical
analysis – that is, resting on foundations which are located
exclusively in the natural world. Virtue flows from learning from
experience in the real world, not from the divine.
The book comes across as a polemic, sketching out a very wide territory
without exhaustively arguing all the points. It sets out a rather
recursive, discursive, and disjointed narrative, which may well be
inevitable given the huge theme, but which made the arguments, although
clear enough taken singly, rather difficult to build up into a coherent
picture (and to review). A decent editor would have helped enormously.
I was occasionally brought up short by anti-theistic statements: for
example, that to seek to locate the source of a moral code in a divine
standard is ‘immature, epistemically and emotionally irresponsible’
(p138). He is rather impatient of any world view which requires a
supernatural foundation for a meaningful life. I respect his right to
pronounce that there is no supernatural (without agreeing with it), but
I did find his occasional tipping-over into outright insults
unnecessary and unworthy of the rest of the book. That said, he’s
certainly no reductive materialist or devotee of scientism, which he
denounces as a ‘silly and puffed-up view that is not worth taking
seriously’(p72). Take that, Dawkins!
Flanagan starts by reclaiming the topic of the good life, and how to
live it, as the proper vocation of philosophy. (This is, of course,
also a central concern of psychotherapy.) This is ‘Project Eudaimonia’.
He then suggests a model which purports to describe the domain of
meaning within which we all located2. By participating in this
multifactorial domain of meaning, we make sense of things, orient
ourselves, live meaningfully, through what he calls the psycho-poetic
performance of our individual lives.
Flanagan goes on to assert that consciousness can be explained using
only natural resources3. Next, free will (no stone is left unturned by
Flanagan) comes under scrutiny. Does the scientific image spell death
for free will? Yes, for the Western libertarian idea of unfettered free
agency. No, for the more ancient idea of voluntary versus involuntary
action: voluntary action is that initiated by the conscious analysis of
prior experience. The will seems to be self-initiating but this is an
illusion: our actions are voluntary but nonetheless still part of the
causal nexus. Flanagan sees Buddhism as generally supporting this idea.
Having settled the big questions to his satisfaction, Flanagan
continues with the main part of his thesis: the extraction of ethical
norms from nature. He insists that ethical norms can be addressed
empirically: human moral behaviour is the result of instincts and
feelings endowed through Darwinian natural selection. Thankfully,
Flanagan does not descend to the selfish gene level of debate, and
states that there are now ‘credible accounts of how biological
evolution could allow genuine psychological altruism’ (p47). He moves
through a discussion of Plato, claiming that the Good, the Beautiful
and the True are not timeless external Forms, but ‘works in progress,
things we seek to make determinate within the constraints of natural
orientations’(p56). We flourish as and when we pursue these works in
progress. It is in our natures to seek such flourishing – we are ‘born
with a thirst’ for it. The problem here is that Flanagan is not
convincing in his account of the natural origins of this thirst for the
good, beautiful and true: he simply says that a (scientific) account is
still required but that it is ‘not that difficult’. Others might claim
in the meantime that the thirst comes from God, or some other
supernatural source.
In a sort of interlude, Flanagan now abruptly turns to a discussion of
Buddhism and science. He sees the possibility of great mutual
enrichment between the two traditions. Some reconciliation between
Buddhism and science is possible because Buddhism is non-theistic and
non-doctrinal. But he regards the Dalai Lama (who he has the greatest
respect for) with some suspicion when the Dalai Lama points out the
difference between not finding something (scientifically) and finding
its non-existence. The immaterial mind and karma across rebirth are two
such examples of the former: science cannot prove their non-existence,
leaving Buddhism free to assert them, to Flanagan’s delicately
expressed consternation over many pages of densely argued polemic4.
Now turning back to his main thesis, Flanagan seeks an empiricist
foundation for the idea ‘that some ways of living and being are better
than others’(p107). He finds the precedent for this in two ancient
examples: Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics and the Abhidhamma. In both
cases, one observes lives that work and lives that don’t work and one
learns from them. Flanagan sees Aristotle’s virtues and the Buddha’s
Four Divine Abodes as recommendations for ways of being/acting
resulting from experience: they are proposed as virtues to be aspired
to because they work. Flanagan is aware of the danger of circularity
here: ethical norms are evaluated according to experience – desirable
norms lead to flourishing – but the judgement of
flourishing itself involves applying ethical norms, and it’s not at all
clear to me whether Flanagan avoids this danger. The problem is that
Flanagan seeks an empirical method of making absolute moral evaluations
of living - ‘some ways of living and being are better than others’ –
but by basing virtue on empiricism alone, he makes it contingent,
thereby removing any firm basis to finally evaluate any particular
virtue or life. The absolute evaluations appear to rest on that
hypothetical innate human thirst for the good, beautiful and true.
Missing out chapter 5 (which discusses neuroscience), we come to the
last chapter which seeks to naturalise spirituality. Flanagan ranges
very far and wide here in a haphazard way which makes succinct
criticism impossible. Here’s one observation: although Flanagan sees
belief in the supernatural as childish, he believes it does no harm as
long as the supernatural is thought of as a myth rather than as a
literally existing truth. Belief in a myth is not ‘true belief’(p193) –
when we talk about myths ‘we are only talking about stories’ (p191).
The implication is that only empirically verifiable information is
worthy of ‘true belief’ and stories, although they may provide deep
meaning, are (as sources of truth) morally suspect, not entirely
virtuous, lightweight. So much for poetry, literature and all the other
works of imagination which bring meaning to the rest of us. Meaning,
magic and mystery are not so much naturalised as neutralised.
Notes
1 Flanagan was the researcher behind the story in 2003 about a
meditating Buddhist monk showing ‘a remarkably frisky left pre-frontal
cortex … a site well-correlated with reports of positive mood’ (p149).
The press reported this at the time as showing that [Buddhist]
meditation leads to happiness, and that the seat of happiness in the
brain had been located. Flanagan remains properly sanguine about this.
2 This is a world of meaning constituted by a set of spaces of meaning
{art, science, technology, ethics, politics, spirituality}, which he
calls the Space of MeaningEarly 21st century. These six spaces of
meaning are natural phenomena, the practices of humans, themselves
natural creatures, and therefore should be
explicable through the natural sciences and human sciences. The
sciences can therefore explain, in principle, the nature and function
of {art, science, technology, ethics, politics, spirituality}.
3 Conscious mental events are ‘Janus-faced and uniquely so’: they are
realized in objective neurological states and they have first person
subjective feel - phenomenality. Each aspect necessarily implies the
other. There is no particular mystery: that is simply how things are.
But consciousness naturally subsists in brain processes: Flanagan has
no truck with the concept of immaterial properties of mind.
4 Eg the randomness and lack of directionality in Darwinian evolution
does not sit well with karma, and rebirth requires some sort of
immaterial mind property which Flanagan has already rejected.
5 Courage, justice, temperance, wisdom, generosity, wit, friendliness, truthfulness, magnificence and greatness of soul.
6 Loving-kindness, compassion, appreciative joy and equanimity.
Tony Danford 2007