"What if you're wrong?"

Richard Dawkins's answer to the question "What if you're wrong?" (asked by a Liberty University student at Randolph College in 2006) received so much attention that the short video of his rapid-fire little speech got over three and a half million hits on YouTube. Someone has made an animated collage which nicely illustrates Dawkins's points:



Although Dawkins used a lot of examples, he made his main point clearly when he said "there's no particular reason to pick on the Judeo-Christian god, in which by the sheerest accident you happen to have been brought up". His point is not:

(1)  Since you have acquired your religious beliefs in such and such a way, these beliefs are questionable (or false).

It is:

(2)  You would have acquired utterly different religious beliefs if you had been brought up in a different religious tradition, and these different sets of religious beliefs are equally unjustified. So you have no more reason to accept one of them rather than the other.

(1) is an instance of the genetic fallacy, while (2) merely points out the lack of justifying reason for preferring one religion over another. That (2) is Dawkins's main point is also supported by his last remark: "What if you're wrong about the great Juju at the bottom of the sea?"

Dawkins's main point is clear enough (which explains why it is so forceful), but it doesn't stop someone like William Lane Craig from insisting that Dawkins committed the genetic fallacy:



Craig the great strawman maker... (Sigh). Alvin Plantinga, who is a more sophisticated thinker than Craig, fails to offer a more reasonable response to Dawkins's main point. Actually, he's responding to Philip Kitcher, but Kitcher's point is the same as Dawkins's:

For all their doctrinal disagreements, Muslims, Jews, and Christians agree on many things. If, however, you had been acculturated within one of the aboriginal traditions of Australia, or within a society in central Africa, or among the Inuit, you would accept, on the basis of cultural authority, radically different ideas. You would believe in the literal truth of stories about the spirits of ancestors and about their presence in sacred places, and you would believe these things as firmly as Christians believe in the resurrection, or Jews in God's covenant, or Muslims in the revelations to the Prophet. (Living with Darwin: Evolution, Design, and the Future of Faith, p.141)

Plantinga's response sounds a bit deeper than Craig's, but is no less missing the point:

Kitcher points out, as others before him have, that most believers accept the religion in which they have been brought up. And that can be worrying: if I had been brought up in medieval China, for example, I would almost certainly not have been a Christian. Fair enough; and this can induce a certain cosmic vertigo. But doesn't the same go for Kitcher? Suppose he had been born in medieval China, or for that matter medieval Europe: in all likelihood, he would not have been skeptical of the supernatural. As I say; this can induce vertigo; but isn't it just part of the human condition? (Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism, p.62)

Again, Kitcher's (and Dawkins's) point is not that religious beliefs are questionable because believers have been brought up to accept those beliefs, but that believers have no more reason to accept the religious beliefs they have rather than some other religious beliefs. Kitcher makes the point straightforwardly this way:

The trouble with supernaturalism is that it comes in so many incompatible forms, all of which are grounded in just the same way. (p.142)

Since these incompatible forms of supernaturalism are grounded in just the same way, we have no reason to prefer one form over another. Most believers stick to their religious belief simply because they have been brought up to accept them blindly.

It is indeed part of the human condition that we have all been brought up to accept certain beliefs, but it is not part of the human condition that we should not question these beliefs. Plantinga is right that Kitcher would not have been skeptical of the supernatural if he had been born in medieval Europe, but that doesn't mean Kitcher's skepticism about the supernatural is no more justified than medieval religious beliefs --- they are not incompatible forms of the same kind of belief system that are grounded in just the same way.

Proving a negative

A. C. Grayling remarks in his short essay 'Proving a Negative' (in Thinking of Answers, pp.32-34) that "[t]he claim that negatives cannot be proved is beloved of theists who resist the assaults of sceptics by asserting that the non-existence of God cannot be proved." (p.32) It is indeed not uncommon for a theist to challenge an atheist with the question 'Can you prove that God doesn't exist?', where the rationale for posing the question is that it is impossible to prove a negative. It is, however, a little strange that Grayling does not mention also the fact that some atheists (and agnostics) like to invoke this very same principle of folk logic when they argue against theism: they would insist that the burden of proof lies with the theist because it is impossible to prove a negative but possible, and sometimes easy, to prove a positive.

In any case, it is puzzling why there are so many people who accept the principle that it is impossible to prove a negative, for the principle seems obviously false. If 'a negative' means simply 'a negative proposition', then anyone who accepts the law of non-contradiction (i.e. '~(p & ~p)') has to accept that there is at least one negative that can be proved: the law of non-contradiction is a negative proposition and it can be proved in classical logic. Relatedly, propositions of the form "'p' is not false" are negatives in this sense. Assuming bivalence, proving that 'p' is not false is equivalent to proving that 'p' is true --- unless propositions of the form "'p' is true" cannot be proved, it is possible to prove a negative.

Perhaps for those who accept the principle in question 'a negative' here means 'a negative existential proposition' (i.e. a proposition of the form 'There is no x' or 'x does not exist'). Grayling does not tackle the question why people accept the principle in question, but he does give a simple counterexample: "consider how you prove the absence of pennies in a piggy-bank. You break it open and look inside: it is empty." (p.34) I think most people would agree that doing so proves the negative 'There are no pennies in the piggy-bank'. So, even when 'a negative' means 'a negative existential proposition', it is still clear that a negative can be proved.

Perhaps the universe of discourse is supposed to be unrestricted when the principle in question is applied. It is easy to prove that there are no pennies in the piggy-bank, but, it may be claimed, it is impossible to prove that there are no unicorns, period (though it can be proved rather easily that there are no unicorns in your closet). There are two problems here. First, if the difficulty of proving that there are no unicorns anywhere in the universe is due to our technological limitations, then those who accept the principle in question have to clarify what they mean by 'impossible' when they claim that it is impossible to prove a negative. It is at least not a metaphysical or logical impossibility. Second, it is not clear that the universe of discourse matters here. It may be easy to prove that there are no unicorns in your closet, but it is difficult to prove that there are no invisible unicorns in your closet. And it seems impossible to prove that there are no unicorns of the following kind in your closet: unicorns that are undetectable unless they allow you to sense their presence.

If it is impossible to prove that God does not exist, it may be because God is undetectable unless God allows us to sense her presence, rather than because 'God does not exist' is an unrestricted negative existential proposition. It remains a puzzle to me why there are so many people who accept that it is impossible to prove a negative.

The normativity of life's meaningfulness

The question about the meaningfulness of one’s life is a normative question, and an answer to it is a normative judgment. If I understand that a meaningful life is better than a life that is not meaningful, and judge that my life is meaningful, I will see that the judgment has normative implications for what I should think, what I should do, what I should be, and what I can reasonably expect of others as far as their evaluative attitudes toward my life are concerned. If others agree with my judgment that my life is meaningful, they will see the same implications.

As Christine Korsgaard points out, “[c]oncepts like knowledge, beauty, and meaning, as well as virtue and justice, all have a normative dimension, for they tell us what to think, what to like, what to say, what to do, and what to be” (The Sources of Normativity, p.9; italics added). When we apply these concepts to make judgments, we make normative judgments. This is the case when the concept of meaning (or meaningfulness) is applied to a human life. Suppose I ask the question about my life’s meaningfulness and answer it positively, that is, I make the judgment that my life is meaningful. Such a judgment has implications for me with respect to my thought and action: it is not just that the judgment implies some possible things that I can think or do; it is that it makes claims on me and I admit that it has authority over me. In other words, I feel the normative force of the judgment that my life is meaningful.

Why does the judgment that my life is meaningful have normative authority over me? First of all, such a judgment is not subjective --- it is not, as some may put it, just a matter of one’s opinion. The judgment that my life is meaningful is intersubjective or interpersonal. And second, the judgment has to be justified, rational, or supported by good reasons. I am rationally compelled by the judgment to think or act in certain ways rather than others. Putting these two aspects together, the judgment ‘My life is meaningful’ is, as Allan Gibbard puts it in his discussion of normative authority, “interpersonally valid” (Wise Choices, Apt Feelings, p.155).

When I judge that my life is meaningful, not only do I have a positive evaluation of my life, a positive answer to the question of who I am, and a good reason for my existence, I also have a clear answer to the question of how I should live my life --- what I should think, what I should like, what I should say, what I should do, and what I should be. It is difficult to see how the judgment can have normative implications for me and for others, and can significantly constrain or direct my life, if I understand the meaningfulness of my life to be something purely subjective, something depends solely on what I happen to believe, feel, desire, or value. In order to have normative authority over me, such a judgment has to be, like other normative judgments, at least in some respect intersubjective if not objective too. The normative force of such an evaluative judgment has to come, at least partly, from something beyond my subjective perspective in the sense that the correctness of the judgment is not simply up to me.

This is why there is a significant difference between ‘My life is meaningful’ and ‘My life is meaningful to me’. I would not be altogether satisfied if the latter was all I could truly say as an answer to the question about my life’s meaningfulness. There would be something wrong with my understanding of meaningfulness if I believed that my life is meaningful simply because it is meaning to me. In this respect judgments about meaningfulness are like judgments about beauty: if I want to know whether I am beautiful, the answer ‘I am beautiful to me’ is not going to be good enough to me. Even if beauty is in the eye of the beholder, there has to be at least one beholder other than oneself.

Death and meaningfulness (II)

Why do some of us think death implies meaninglessness? One plausible explanation is that when we are deeply unnerved by the unavoidability of our death, we may confuse the end of our lives with the end of everything. Of course we all know that the world continues to exist after we die, but it is easy to go from the thought that we will no longer see the world after we die to the thought that for us the world does not exist after we die. Surely ‘for us the world does not exist’ is still different from ‘the world does not exist’, but it is just a small step to go from there to the thought that for us there is no difference between the two. If for us the world does not exist after we die, and if we see meaningfulness as part of the world, then for us meaningfulness does not exist after we die. Again, ‘for us meaningfulness does not exist’ is different from ‘meaningfulness does not exist’, but it is also just a small step to arrive at the depressing thought that for us there is no difference between the two.

The problem with this series of thoughts is that there is no ‘for us’ after we die. ‘For us the word does not exist’ is nothing but a confused way of thinking about our death: ‘For us the world does not exist after we die’ does not say anything more than the trivial truth ‘We are dead after we die’.  For those who believe that we continue to exist consciously in some form after we die (i.e., after our earthly lives end), it does make sense to speak of ‘for us’ after we die. But if we believe that we live on after death, we should not believe also that for us the world does not exist after we die, though we do not live in the earthly world any more. In either case, there is no reason for us to think that death implies that our lives are meaningless.

Another plausible explanation of why we may conclude that life is meaningless when we think about death is that we may confuse the end of our lives with the end of everything about our lives. Tolstoy seemed to be having such a confusion when he wrote that death “obliterates everything: myself, my works and the memory of both” (A Confession and Other Religious Writings, p.33). Of course Tolstoy knew that his death would not obliterate everything; what he meant was presumably that his death would obliterate everything about his life. But even that, as I have already pointed out, is not true: his works were not obliterated by his death and we still read them today. Let us, however, imagine that Tolstoy’s works (and everything that belonged to him or was created by him) were obliterated at the very moment of his death and that no one remembered him or his works after he died. Tolstoy seemed to think that his life would be meaningless if that happened, but he did not explain why he thought so. Perhaps it was because for him the thought was obviously true; after all he did say that “once sober it is impossible not to see that it is all a mere trick, and a stupid trick” (p.31, italics added).  But in fact it is far from obvious.

Tolstoy’s works still exist and are read by many people; would his pessimistic view that death implies meaninglessness have been changed had he known that his works and the memory of him would not be obliterated by his death? The answer seems to be ‘No’, for he had every reason to believe, and did believe, that his works and the memory of him would last for a long time, but he still held that pessimistic view. What really bothered him was the fact that eventually his works and the memory of him will be obliterated. Now we should see that according to Tolstoy what is necessary for meaningfulness is immortality --- even if his works would not last forever, if he lasted forever, his life could still be meaningful.

Again, Tolstoy did not explain why he thought immortality is necessary for meaningfulness. Some of us would agree with Tolstoy on this or even think Tolstoy was obviously right, but we have to keep in mind that without offering any justification for believing that immortality is necessary for meaningfulness, the belief may simply be a rationalization of our desire to continue to live. At the very least we cannot simply take the belief to be obviously true.  Indeed, some philosophers argue for the opposite. Bernard Williams, for example, argues in his brilliant essay ‘The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality’ that “[i]mmortality, or a state without death, would be meaningless, … in a sense, death gives the meaning to life” (Williams, Problems of the Self, p.82). If we find it hard to accept that immortality is undesirable, that, as Williams also puts it, “an eternal life would be unliveable” (p.100), it is at least reasonable to think that a life can be meaningful without being immortal. In any case, instead of arguing directly for this reasonable view of the relation between meaningfulness and immortality, I am going to present a dilemma to those who think that immortality is necessary for meaningfulness.

The dilemma is this: either we understand immortality in terms of human life as we live it, in which case we have no reason to believe that the meaningfulness of life of this kind requires that the life be endless; or we understand immortality in other terms, such as in terms of disembodied existence, in which case it is not clear that we have any idea of what it is for that kind of life to be meaningful. If an earthly human life cannot be meaningful, why would lengthening it (endlessly) make any difference as far as meaningfulness is concerned? In fact, it seems more reasonable to think that if human life as we live it is meaningless, then living such a life endlessly is equally meaningless, if not more so. The other horn of the dilemma is even more intractable. For we can at least understand the idea of an immortal human life in which we continue to do the kinds of things human being are in fact doing or capable of doing, but if an immortal life is supposed to be utterly different from human life as we live it (and it is undeniable that a disembodied life is utterly different from an earthly human life), then we simply do not understand what it is like to live such a life, and hence do not understand what would make such a life meaningful.

It should be noted that none of what I have said suggests that death is not a bad thing. There are cases in which we can reasonably say that death is not necessarily a bad thing to happen to the person involved, but this certainly does not imply that death is always not a bad thing to happen to a person. In fact, it usually is a bad thing. But even if it is bad for a person to die now given the person she is and given the life she is living, it does not follow that it is bad that she will die later. And even if it is necessarily a bad thing for her to die, no matter when, it does not follow that her life before she dies is meaningless.

Death and meaningfulness (I)

It is clear why thinking about death naturally leads to reflection on life: death is the termination of life. It is not, however, as easy to understand why thinking about death may lead to the conclusion that (one’s) life is meaningless or that (one’s) life is not meaningful enough because of death. No one has expressed more directly than Tolstoy did the thought that death threatens meaningfulness:

Today or tomorrow sickness and death will come (and they had already arrived) to those dear to me, and to myself, and nothing will remain other than the stench and the worms. Sooner or later my deeds, whatever they may have been, will be forgotten and will no longer exist. What is all the fuss about then? How can a person carry on living and fail to perceive this? That is what is so astonishing! It is only possible to go on living while you are intoxicated with life; once sober it is impossible not to see that it is all a mere trick, and a stupid trick! That is exactly what it is: there is nothing either witty or amusing, it is only cruel and stupid. (Tolstoy, A Confession and Other Religious Writings, translated by J. Kentish (London: Penguin Books, 1987), p.31)

And he asked, rhetorically, “[I]s there any meaning in my life that will not be annihilated by the inevitability of death which awaits me?” (p.35)  Since the inevitability of death awaits not only Tolstoy but all of us, what he said was supposed to apply to all human beings: death will annihilate any meaning in our lives. The implicit idea here is that if life really has meaning, it must consist in something that can defeat the threat of death to meaningfulness. In other words, life is meaningless unless we can find some kind of long-lasting and grand meaningfulness.

What reason did Tolstoy give for thinking that death implies meaninglessness? It seems to be simply this: whatever one has achieved “will be forgotten and will no longer exist”. Literally this is not true, at least not true of Tolstoy, for his writings still exist and we still read and appreciate them today. What Tolstoy had in mind might well be this: sooner or later, if not in ten thousand years, then in a million years, we will all be dead and nothing we have achieved will still exist. In a million years, there will not be any human beings; there probably will not be any intelligent beings on this planet to appreciate and value what some human beings have achieved or created; there will not be any traces of War and Peace or Anna Karenina. Tolstoy’s conclusion seems to be that because of this none of the things anyone of us has achieved matters at all.

Let us grant that none of the things anyone of us has achieved will matter in a million years, but this is different from saying that none of the things anyone of us has achieved matters. ‘X does not matter’ does not follow from ‘X does not matter in a million years’. Besides, as Thomas Nagel argues:

It is often remarked that nothing we do now will matter in a million years. But if that is true, then by the same token, nothing that will be the case in a million years matters now. In particular, it does not matter now that in a million years nothing we do now will matter. Moreover, even if what we did now were going to matter in a million years, how could that keep our present concerns from being absurd? If their mattering now is not enough to accomplish that, how would it help if they mattered a million years from now? (Nagel, ‘The Absurd’, in Mortal Questions, p.12)

In terms of meaningfulness rather than mattering, we can say that the fact that in a million years there will not be anyone to consider one’s life meaningful does not imply that one’s life should not be considered meaningful. If one’s life is meaningful now, it is still a meaningful life even if no one in the further future will remember one’s life.

It seems that most of us would agree that a meaningful life will not cease to be meaningful simply because something happens in the future after the person whose life it is dies. Indeed, most of us would agree that a life does not even have to be long to be meaningful. Obvious examples are Mozart and Anne Frank.  But then why do some of us think death implies meaninglessness? Why is it so natural for some of us to conclude that life is meaningless (or not meaningful enough) when thinking about death? It is as if before we think about death, we see our lives as meaningful, but the meaningfulness suddenly disappears once we think about death. Why?

Clashing vanities

Nietzsche has the following observations about people with vanity:

Clashing vanities. Two people with equally great vanity retain a bad impression of one another after they meet, because each one was so busy with the impression he wanted to elicit in the other that the other made no impression on him; finally both notice that their efforts have failed and blame the other for it. (Human, All Too Human, section six, 338)

These observations seem right, but only roughly. A person who is trying hard to impress others will probably not be able to pay attention to things other than whether he succeeds in his attempt, and hence not be able to be impressed by others. But this is true of everyone, not just vain people. Nietzsche seems to be suggesting that people with vanity are more likely to try hard to impress others than people without vanity (are there such people?), for otherwise the phrase "with equally great vanity" could be deleted and he would still be making the same point.

Let's say Nietzsche is right, that is, that a vain person likes to impress others. However, it is reasonable to think that a vain person would not try to impress just anyone. Being vain, he would try to impress people who have impressed him in the first place, for it is impressing such people that would satisfy his vanity as far as impressing people is concerned.

Now suppose that two people with equally great vanity met, and that they tried to impress each other because each of them had been impressed by the other in some way. If they both failed in their attempt to (further) impress the other for the reason mentioned above, it is not clear they would blame the other for the failure. Indeed, the more they had been impressed by the other, the less likely they would blame the other for the failure. The psychology is fairly simple: the more they had been impressed by the other, the more they would understand why they failed to impress the other --- a person so impressive would not be easy to impress. In that case, their failure to impress does not hurt. And for people with vanity, if it doesn't hurt, it doesn't matter.

History and value

At the beginning of The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts, in a section entitled ‘History and Value’ (pp.4-6), Milan Kundera discusses the relation between historical consciousness and aesthetic evaluation. He introduces the issue with an imaginary case:

Let us imagine a contemporary composer writing a sonata that in its form, its harmonies, its melodies resembles Beethoven’s. Let’s even imagine that this sonata is so masterfully made that, if it had actually been by Beethoven, it would count among his greatest works. And yet no matter how magnificent, signed by a contemporary composer it would be laughable. At best its author would be applauded as a virtuoso of pastiche.

Kundera is well aware of a possible, and natural, response to the above evaluation of the contemporary composer’s anachronistic piece. Indeed, he mimics such a response:

What? We feel aesthetic pleasure at a sonata by Beethoven and not at one with the same style and charm if it comes from one of our own contemporaries? Isn’t that the height of hypocrisy? So then the sensation of beauty is not spontaneous, spurred by our sensibility, but instead is cerebral, conditioned by our knowing a date?

But he insists that there is “[n]o way around it: historical consciousness is so thoroughly inherent in our perception of art that this anachronism (a Beethoven piece written today) would be spontaneously (that is, without the least hypocrisy) felt to be ridiculous, false, incongruous, even monstrous”. Put more straightforwardly, his point is that “it is only within the context of an art’s historical evolution that aesthetic value can be seen”.

Is Kundera right about the relation between historical consciousness and aesthetic evaluation? This is a big topic and I won’t attempt to show that Kundera is wrong. What I would like to point out is that he might have conflated aesthetic experience and aesthetic judgment. Aesthetic experience necessarily has phenomenological features; by contrast, although aesthetic judgment is usually accompanied by aesthetic experience, the judgment itself is cerebral and does not have to have its own phenomenology. In Kundera’s own words, there is “aesthetic pleasure” or “sensation of beauty”, and there is “perception of art” or “aesthetic value [that] can be seen”; my point is, the two don’t overlap perfectly.

The main subject matter of Kundera’s book is the (modern European) novel, but since he uses a musical example in the passage quoted above, let me use another musical example to illustrate my point.

Prokofiev’s first symphony, completed in 1917, was marked by imitation. As the composer confesses in his autobiography:

I had in mind the thought of writing a symphony in the style of Haydn … If Haydn were living today, I thought, he would keep to his way of writing, while at the same time incorporating some newer ideas. I wanted to compose just such a symphony --- a symphony in the classical style. I finally gave it the name Symphonie classique --- firstly because it was so simple: also in the hope of annoying the Philistines, and in the secret desire to win in the end, if the symphony should prove itself to be a genuine ‘classic’.

The last sentence is intriguing, particularly because of the combination of the word ‘genuine’ and the word ‘classic’ in scare quotes. Prokofiev’s first symphony can never be a genuine classic, but it can be a genuine ‘classic’. As a matter of fact, the symphony was well-received and is still enjoyed by classical music lovers today. It is not felt to be ridiculous, false, incongruous, or monstrous.

Is this a counterexample to Kundera’s view? There is no simple answer to the question. On the one hand, Prokofiev himself admitted that he imitated Haydn and tried to write a symphony in the classical style; on the other hand, it could be maintained that the symphony is not ridiculed because there are enough “newer ideas” in it to distinguish it from a mere imitation --- the classical style is more apparent than real.

In any case, we can still distinguish between the aesthetic experience one has when listening to the symphony and the judgment one may make about the aesthetic value of the piece. Even if the aesthetic judgment has to be made within the context of the historical evolution of the symphony as a form of art, it does not follow that the aesthetic experience cannot be independent of such a context. We don't have to deny that aesthetic judgment can affect aesthetic experience, but we can at least imagine that someone who knows nothing about Haydn, Prokofiev, or the classical style may still enjoy Prokofiev’s Symphonie classique.

The following is the charming, and very short, third movement of the symphony; experience it yourself:

The curious case of Binjamin Wilkomirski (Part II)

Sometimes an identity of a person has so many elements or aspects that it is not always easy to tell what it is about that identity that contributes to the meaningfulness of the person’s life. We have seen that it was by seeing himself as Wilkomirski the sufferer-survivor-reporter that Grosjean found meaning in his life. The fact that he was not really the sufferer or the survivor implies that he was not a genuine reporter either ¾ something that did not take place could not be reported. Yes, Grosjean was still the author of the book, but this was not an element of the identity in question that could contribute to the meaningfulness of his life, for the book was not what it was supposed to be. By contrast, if Grosjean’s book had been published as a novel, then his identity as the author of the book could have contributed to the meaningfulness of his life.

Grosjean’s case reminds me of a friend who is a devoted Christian minister, who presumably believes that his life is meaningful by virtue of his identity as a Christian minister, or, in his own words, as God’s servant. Let us imagine that in the last few years of his life he became skeptical about his religious beliefs and finally gave them up (this is, I have to say, extremely unlikely to happen). Suppose there were no other identities he identified himself with; should he then believe that his life was meaningless? It depends. On the one hand, he had to say that since there is no God, no one can be God’s servant. On the other hand, there might be other elements in his identity as a Christian minister that could contribute to the meaningfulness of his life. For example, he might have, in his capacity as a minister, helped a lot of people deal with their personal problems. If he himself valued this element of his identity as a minister, and other people valued it too, then his life could still be meaningful by virtue of his identity as a Christian minister.

It is risky to focus on one single identity in such a way that the meaningfulness of your life depends solely on it. If you have only one identity that you think makes your life meaningful, and if something goes wrong with respect to that identity, such as if you actually have a serious misunderstanding of the nature of that identity, or if you suddenly do not value it any more, your life may turn out to be meaningless. Grosjean’s is a case in point. If all goes well, then one identity will suffice; but things do not always go well. Although not all our identities are chosen by us, some are. It is thus wise, as far as the meaningfulness of our lives is concerned, to develop what psychologist Daniel Nettle calls ‘self-complexity’. As Nettle explains, “if I am just an academic, and I have an academic setback, then my whole self seems less efficacious and worthwhile. However, if I have many other facets to myself, then the effect of the setback on my identity is much less severe” (Happiness: The Science Behind Your Smile, p.156). He speaks in the context of discussing happiness, but it is clear that the same point applies to meaningfulness.

The above point about self-complexity may give us some ideas about how to live a meaningful life. This may also be true of the final point I would like to make, which is that a meaningful life consists in living it rather than in thinking about how to live it. Part of Grosjean’s problem might be that he was too much aware of the problem of meaningfulness and tried too hard to make his life meaningful. There is such a thing as thinking too much and too often about the problem about meaningfulness. This may be what Wittgenstein means when he writes:

The way to solve the problem you see in life is to live in a way that will make what is problematic disappear. … a man who lives rightly won’t experience the problem as sorrow, so for him it will not be a problem, but a joy rather; in other words for him it will be a bright halo round his life, not a dubious background. (Culture and Value, p.27)

The curious case of Binjamin Wilkomirski (Part I)

In 1995, a book entitled Bruchstücke. Aus einer Kindheit 1939–1948 was published in Germany (the English translation of the book, published in 1996, was entitled Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood). The name of the author was Binjamin Wilkomirski, and the book was a vivid and supposedly accurate account of his horrifying experiences as a very young Polish Jewish boy in two Nazi concentration camps. Being an appealing survivor’s tale with high literary quality, the book quickly became an international best-seller and received numerous awards. Wilkomirski gave readings of the book everywhere, was interviewed on TV, met with and spoke to other Holocaust survivors publicly, and participated in academic symposiums on the book or on subjects concerning the Holocaust. He was compared to Anne Frank; if his story was not more moving, it was certainly more satisfying and probably more inspiring, for he survived while Frank did not.

But then it turned out that nothing described in the book about that little Jewish boy had ever happened. The author was not even Jewish, and his real name was ‘Bruno Grosjean’, not the obviously Jewish ‘Binjamin Wilkomirski’. Grosjean was a Swiss who had been born to an unmarried woman and later adopted by a childless couple, and who grew up to be a professional (but not outstanding) clarinetist. He was born in 1941, the year one of the concentration camps in which the story happened began to operate, and he had never left Switzerland before adulthood. The ‘memoir’ was based on history books, magazines, and novels Grosjean had read, as well as films he had seen. His account was first questioned by a Swiss journalist named Daniel Ganzfrield, whose arguments against the authenticity of it were, however, considered by some to be inconclusive. The Swiss historian Stefan Maechler was later commissioned by Wilkomirski/Grosjean’s literacy agency to investigate the matter, and Maechler proved in great detail that many of the things described in Grosjean’s book contradicted historical facts.

Graosjean’s book was not the first autobiography of an alleged Holocaust survivor that turned out to be a fraud, nor was it the last. What makes Grosjean’s case more interesting and relevant to our discussion is that Grosjean might actually believe, or at least believe that he believed, the story he told in his book. Grosjean certainly knew that he grew up in Switzerland, but he also knew that he was an adopted child. If he did not remember much the first few years of his life, it was not impossible for him to believe that he was a traumatized child rescued from the war and exchanged for a child named ‘Bruno Grosjean’. As social psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson understand the Wilkomirski/Grosjean case, “Grosjean spent more than twenty years transforming himself into Wilkomirski; writing Fragments was the last step of his metamorphosis into a new identity, not the first step of a calculated lie” (Tavris & Elliot, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me), p.84).

Let us assume that Tavris’s and Aronson’s understanding of the Wilkomirski/Grosjean case is correct. What Tavris and Aronson say next relates the case to the problem about meaningfulness: “Wilkomirski’s new identity as a survivor of the Holocaust gave him a powerful sense of meaning and purpose, along with the adoration and support of countless others”. Grosjean’s book was, according to Tavris and Aronson, a result of “a quest for meaning in his life” (ibid., italics added). They presumably do not have a fully developed theory of a meaningful life like mine when they relate the meaningfulness of Grosjean’s life to his identity, but their description of the case fits quite well the account of a meaningful life I have suggested: Grosjean’s sense of meaningfulness came from his newly found identity, which was valued not only by himself but also by others; and it was this newly found identity that allowed him to evaluate his life positively, that gave him directions for how he should live his life, that he could see as the reason for his existence, and that he happily believed to be who he really was.

What exactly was Grosjean’s newly found identity which he thought made his life meaningful? It may appear that the answer is straightforward: it was his identity as a Holocaust survivor, or more precisely, his identity as a Jewish boy who suffered from his experiences in Nazi concentration camps and survived. But suffering in itself does not give meaning to a life. We would not say that the lives of all the Jews who were tortured and murdered in concentration camps were meaningful lives simply by virtue of their suffering, nor would we say that at least the lives of those who survived were meaningful simply by virtue of their suffering and their survival. What Grosjean thought made his life meaningful was his identity as the young Holocaust survivor who lived to tell his story, which inspired and moved a lot of people. According to Maechler, Grosjean “truly blossomed in his role as a concentration-camp victim, for it was in it that he finally found himself”, but what we should note is that “[v]ideotapes and eyewitness reports of Wilkomirski’s presentations give the impression of a man made euphoric by his own narrative” (Maechler, The Wilkomirski Affair: A Study in Biographical Ttruth, p.273, note 14, italics added). It was not being the sufferer, not being the sufferer-survivor, but being the sufferer-survivor-reporter, that counted for the meaningfulness of Wilkomirski’s life.*

*  If you are inclined to disagree, just imagine that Anne Frank survived but had not written her wartime diary, or that she had written the diary but neither she nor the diary survived. Would Frank’s life have been as meaningful as it actually was?