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Overview
How to live meaningfully in the face of the unknowable
We human beings had no say in existing—we just opened our eyes and found ourselves here. We have a fundamental need to understand who we are and the world we live in. Reason takes us a long way, but mystery remains. When our minds and senses are baffled, faith can seem justified—but faith is not knowledge. In Ultimate Questions, acclaimed philosopher Bryan Magee provocatively argues that we have no way of fathoming our own natures or finding definitive answers to the big questions we all face.
With eloquence and grace, Magee urges us to be the mapmakers of what is intelligible, and to identify the boundaries of meaningfulness. He traces this tradition of thought to his chief philosophical mentors—Locke, Hume, Kant, and Schopenhauer—and shows why this approach to the enigma of existence can enrich our lives and transform our understanding of the human predicament. As Magee puts it, "There is a world of difference between being lost in the daylight and being lost in the dark."
The crowning achievement to a distinguished philosophical career, Ultimate Questions is a deeply personal meditation on the meaning of life and the ways we should live and face death.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781400880454 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/01/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 144 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Ultimate Questions
By Bryan Magee
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Bryan MageeAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4008-8045-4
CHAPTER 1
Time and Space
WHAT WE CALL CIVILISATION HAS EXISTED FOR SOMEthing like six thousand years. We are accustomed to thinking of this as an exceedingly long time. Some of us have a vague outline of it in our heads. In my part of the world this usually starts with the Old Testament of the Bible, followed or accompanied by the rise of Greek civilisation, which was followed by the Roman Empire — each of which lasted for hundreds of years. Then came the thousand years of the Middle Ages. This ended with the Renaissance, which was followed by the Reformation, followed by the Enlightenment, then by the Industrial Revolution and the Romantic Era — and then on to the modern world and our own day. Across these same immensities of time other civilisations — unknown, or mostly unknown, to the people in my part of the world — rose and fell on other parts of the globe's surface: China, Japan, India, Central Asia, the Middle East, South America, Mexico. We think of these vast historical changes as happening in only-just-moving time — time moving in the sort of way a glacier moves.
But now consider the following. There are always some human beings who live to be a hundred. More do so today than ever before, but there have always been some. I have known three quite well, two of them public figures: the politician Emmanuel Shinwell and the musical philanthropist Robert Mayer. (Robert knew Brahms, who was a friend of his family and stayed with them in Mannheim.) When Robert was born there must have been individuals who were then a hundred years old, whom a person could have met and got to know in the same way as I got to know him (or as he got to know Brahms, who died when Robert was seventeen). When those others were born, there must have been yet other such individuals. And so on: one could go further and further back, putting the lives of nameable human beings together, end to end, without any gaps in between. It comes as a shock to realise that the whole of civilisation has occurred within the successive lifetimes of sixty people — which is the number of friends I squeeze into my living room when I have a drinks party. Twenty people take us back to Jesus, twenty-one to Julius Caesar. Even a paltry ten take us back before 1066 and the Norman Conquest. As for the Renaissance, it is only half a dozen people away.
When one measures history by a single possible human lifetime one realises that the whole of it has been almost incredibly short. This means that historical change has been almost incredibly fast. Each of those great empires that so imposingly rose, flourished and fell did so during the overlapping lives of a handful of individuals, usually fewer than half a dozen. So we ourselves are still near the beginning of the entire story. Tomorrow will be followed by the next day, next year by the year after, next century by the century after, next millennium by the millennium after, and the year 20,000 will inevitably come, as will the year 200,000, and the year 2,000,000. It is unstoppable. In fact, as periods in the existence of our planet and other bodies in the universe go, these are short periods of time. From now on, as long as there are human beings on this or any other heavenly body, humans will have a continuous, ever-extending history that traces itself back unbrokenly to our day now and our planet here. What is going to happen to all those people — what will they do — in unending time? How in the far, far future will they think of us now, who are so near the beginning of it all, and whom they will know a lot about if they choose to? How shall we appear to them in the light of all that will have happened between us and them, in a period many, many times as long as that between the dawn of civilisation and today?
I can imagine some of my readers throwing their hands up and protesting: "How can we even think about these things? What concepts do we have for getting hold of any of this? Surely it is self-evident that, a mere two or three thousand years ago, geniuses as great as any there have been, people like Socrates and Plato, could not have foreseen today's world, or almost any of the world's history between their time and ours? What imaginings can we hope to conjure up that are worth having about a period, all of it still in the future, so many times as long as that? It's a blank. We could make a few guesses about developments in the near future, perhaps, but history shows us that even those are more likely to be wrong than right. The truth is we don't know, we cannot know, we haven't the remotest idea. We have no choice but to go on with our lives in the present, pushing into that tiny little bit of the future that our "now" slides into, without thinking about any of the things you're saying — not because they aren't worth thinking about (it would be wonderful if we could) but because we have no way of thinking about them, nothing to think about them with."
My answer is: I have posited nothing outside the ordinary, everyday order of events — nothing religious, nothing supernatural, nothing transcendental. I have merely asked what will happen if circumstances continue exactly as they are today, and go on in this familiar way, as we expect them to do. For such a continuance not to occur might need the intervention of something supernatural, say, like time stopping. There is, it is true, a possibility that the earth will stop, because it could be smashed to pieces in a collision with a body from outer space, or frozen into lifelessness by the sun's cooling; but such possibilities lie either millions (at least) of years in the future or at the outer extremes of unlikelihood. Most are such that the human race will get warning of them before they occur, and may even be able to do something to prevent their happening. For instance, nuclear weapons may turn out to be the saving of the human race. If astronomers tell us that a huge asteroid is on a collision course with our earth, we may be able to knock it off course with nuclear missiles and save ourselves. The missiles would have to be far more powerful than any we have now, but that will happen in the normal course of events. On the other hand it is possible that the human race will destroy itself with those same weapons, thereby bringing its history to an end — but that is rendered unlikely by the fact that our every movement from present into future is dominated by our need to solve the problems of survival. The most obvious likelihood is that the human race will go on living through vast stretches of future time but not necessarily on planet earth: people may find somewhere better to live, or be forced into moving by the earth's becoming uninhabitable. In any case at every point in time they will have a past that is continuous with our past, most of which they will know better than we know it ourselves, because information technology will have been developing during that time.
We are used to thinking of our knowledge of our own past as capacious. Through the last thousand years the nearer history approaches to our own day, the more detailed it becomes. Our knowledge of the twentieth century is unprecedentedly detailed. But we need to remind ourselves that the knowledge we have of the twentieth century was unknowable to anyone living only two hundred years ago. Their location in time sealed them off from it. To them, the twentieth century was as blank as future centuries are to us. Wherever in time human beings may be positioned they know their past but not their future. Yet the events themselves — past, present and future — are the same for everyone, and occur in the same order. It is emphatically not the case that, because we human beings can have little or no knowledge of future events, those events will be vague and indefinite. It is we who are vague and indefinite. It is our knowledge — or rather lack of it — that is the blank. The future is full. We just do not yet know what it is. The events that will fill it are as concrete, factual and specific as those that fill our past.
What we can know, and what we can understand, is so influenced by our location in time that it is impossible for us to disentangle that influence and get a clear look at it. It governs not only our knowledge of our present history and our present future but even our present knowledge of our present society. We cannot see it in perspective. Wherever we are in time almost nothing about our society — from its social structure to its physical plant, from its arts and sciences to its cookery and clothing, from its economy to its religion, from its modes of warfare to its methods of transport, from its manners and mores to its uses of language — is the same as it had been a hundred years before, or as it will be a hundred years hence. For this reason most people are as provincial in time as they are in space: they huddle down into their time and regard it as their total environment. But the opposite would be nearer the truth. Their time is about to be swept away and become nothing but a memory — and not even that for very long, but rather an ever-receding sliver of an ever-expanding history. Little of it will survive in anyone's mind. Even less will be of lasting interest, except to historians.
Nevertheless, each one of us has no choice but to live the whole of his life in his own little bit of time. That is his ration, his all. In life as we know it, time is the cruellest, the most lethal of all the forms of our limitation. In the words of a well-known hymn:
Time, like an ever-rolling stream,
Bears all its sons away;
They fly forgotten, as a dream
Dies at the opening day.
There is no escaping this. Within the empirical world all time will be taken away from us, and with it everything we have and are in this world.
While we are enjoying our moment our spatial movements are confined to a small space, so our limitations in that dimension too are draconian. So narrowly programmed are we biologically for a life on the surface of this planet that if we attempt to depart far from the surface, either inward (under the earth or the sea) or outward (into space), we die unless we can find some artificial way of carrying our surface environment with us. Up to now we have not got far — neither deep nor high. The only object apart from earth that humans have set foot on is the moon, which is less than 240,000 miles away. Meanwhile the already-visible universe is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles across. The Astronomer Royal tells us that we must expect the not-yet-visible universe to extend beyond that by distances which — measured not in miles but in light-years — would be written "not with ten zeros, not even with a hundred, but with millions." Our solar system is the merest speck in all this. Such is the relationship between a human lifetime and the astronomical distances involved that it is unlikely that humans will ever be able to penetrate even as far as the edge of their own solar system.
When I was a graduate student at Yale I was taught that the concept of time and the concept of space are logically interdependent. We find it impossible to define time-concepts without using space-concepts in the definition, and vice versa. Since Einstein, time and space have been understood by physicists to be "inextricably interconnected," as Stephen Hawking puts it. The interconnections are many and profound and not always easy to understand. But let us consider the following.
If I look through a telescope at a star whose light takes nearly a hundred years to reach the earth, I see that star as it was nearly a hundred years ago. For all I know it may not be in that position now: it may have exploded at some time during the last century, or it may now be in a different part of the sky. In any event what impinges on my retina is the light that left that star all those years ago. But this is no different from what happens when I look at anything else. If I look at a person in the same room as myself I see him not as he is "now" but as he was at some point in the past — namely the length of time ago that it has taken light to travel from him to me. In our ordinary lives the distances involved, and therefore the time-intervals, are so minuscule that we ignore them — in fact we are unaware of their existence. But they do exist. And this has the following consequence.
If, on the star I was talking of, there is a sentient being looking at our earth through a telescope, he sees our earth as it was nearly a hundred years ago (in our time). If his telescope is a super-powerful one which enables him to observe human movements, he could be sitting there in my "now" watching World War I being fought. He is watching not a record of the events, or some sort of re-run of them, as in a film, or anything of that sort: he is watching them. He is looking at the events themselves, and seeing the same things as an officer standing on the battlefield with a pair of field-glasses. Both of them are receiving the same light waves travelling towards them at the same speed, and impinging in the same way on the lenses through which they are looking. The sentient being with the telescope is as direct an observer of events as the officer on the battlefield.
If, at the same time by our time, on a different star almost two thousand light-years away, another observer is observing our earth with an even more powerful telescope, he could be watching the crucifixion of Jesus. From a star much nearer, someone could be directly observing the Battle of Hastings. And from a star nearer still, someone could be watching the first Queen Elizabeth processing through the crowded streets of sixteenth-century London. Events not only in human history but throughout the whole history of the earth could be directly observed simultaneously by watchers from stars at different distances. And there would be nothing supernatural about any of it. We are familiar with the idea of God as a being who sees the whole of history simultaneously, but a group of human beings could do it if they were able to set up appropriate observation equipment in the right places. There would be no time-travel involved in any of it, and no magic or miracles. They would merely be connecting themselves up to something that is going on all the time.
Einstein believed, on purely scientific grounds, that there is no objective "now" as far as physics is concerned, and that what counts as "now" depends on the position of the observer relative to what is observed. But if only relative to an observer can there be "now," then only relative to an observer can there be past and future. Einstein was explicit about this: he thought that the idea of pastness and futureness as existing objectively was an illusion, albeit a persistent one that has almost a stranglehold on the human mind. We can better understand the meaning of this if we reflect that every moment in the history we know was "present" for the people living in it, "future" for those who lived before it, and "past" for those who came after, yet the events and their sequence were exactly the same for everybody. This is true, says Einstein, of everything in time. Events have an order in time, so there is temporal order — it is important to understand that he is not disputing that — but in this temporal order there is no privileged moment which is "now." To put it another way, time sequence is objective, but the flow of time is not. The flow of time is a characteristic of experience. So many physicists since Einstein have followed him in this that it cannot be said to be a mystical view: it is a scientific one. Actually the philosophers got there first, with Kant; but it makes a world of difference when a philosophical conjecture acquires a scientific foundation.
So deeply mysterious is the nature of time that important aspects of it continue to be matters in live dispute among physicists. I would be foolish, not being a physicist, to attempt to argue in scientific terms for one view as against another. But the very existence of the controversy among scientists demonstrates, as I have said, that these problems exist independently of philosophy or religion; and they certainly do not have solutions in terms of common sense, or even solutions that are easily intelligible to common sense. Quite the contrary. They baffle common sense.
In some fundamental way, time and space are structural to matter, which could not exist without them. All physical objects, to exist at all, must have a location in space, and also a location in time. What is more, all material objects are ephemeral: they come into existence, are perpetually changing throughout their existence, and — whether suddenly or slowly — go out of existence. To this our bodies are no exception. As Galileo said, if we were immortal we could not be in this world. The time-span of a human body's existence sets limits to the distances through which it can move, so at any given time we may be able to make a partially informed guess as to what these may be. For instance, if it were the case that nothing could move faster than the speed of light, and no person could live longer than 200 years, then no one would be able to get more than 200 light-years away from his starting point — though of course that would not necessarily have to be the earth. Even if the speed of light is not a limiting velocity, it may well be that successive journeys in successive lifetimes will still have the effect of keeping human beings confined to a corner of their universe for aeons of time.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Ultimate Questions by Bryan Magee. Copyright © 2016 Bryan Magee. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
1 Time and Space 12 Finding Our Bearings 17
3 The Human Predicament 33
4 Can Experience Be Understood? 59
5 Where Such Ideas Come From 69
6 Personal Reflections 87
7 Our Predicament Summarized 105
Index 129
What People are Saying About This
"In this fluently written and beautifully clear book, Bryan Magee offers a series of reflections on the human condition, based on a lifetime's study of the central questions of philosophy. Ultimate Questions is a personal testament, one that reflects a yearning for answers coupled with an honest, and indeed humble, admission that such answers cannot be reached."—John Cottingham, author of Philosophy of Religion: Towards a More Humane Approach