Auspicious 140th birth anniversary of Coco Chanel + solemn 70th anniversary of the Iranian coup de état / the 28 Mordad coup d'état:
Here is the longer, fuller video essay corresponding to this written essay:
Here is the shorter, outline video for it, giving an overview of the ideas but without their substantiation:
Here is the schematic diagram for this essay:
The idea-pages in the Edifice corresponding to this essay and comprising the nodes in the schematic above can be found from this page, which goes with the top node (‘Ultimate Objective’), and from there into the other nodes.
Table of Contents:
1. Introduction: The question of the Good
Before we set off examining what the Good is, or what it resides in when it appears in this phenomenal realm—the plane of all things, physical and nonphysical, that are in and of consciousness—it would be good to properly frame the question of the Good and clarify what we are seeking.
We aren't, for one, seeking “good” in a sense I just used above—that it would be good to properly frame the question of the Good. The former “good” there is different from the latter; it is an instrumental good. Properly framing the question of the Good is an instrument, or a means, for some better purpose (whether or not that purpose is itself the Good). If we properly frame the question, then we have a better chance of getting to understand what the Good is, which is our goal.
Is this goal Good? As it happens, I do believe this goal—an inquiry into the Good—has significant connection to the Good itself, but how significant that connection is—whether or not the process of finding out what is the Good has some connection to the Highest Good—will not be inferred today. But in articulating that last point, we can see a definitive general characteristic of the Good, whatever its specific, actual nature is: A Highest Good is something whose existence is found to be valuable not because of its use for something else, but in-itself. The Highest Good, or simply the Good, then, is an end-in-itself, or something of noninstrumental value. A related way to look at it is as something with intrinsic value, i.e., good because of what it itself is, rather than extrinsic value, i.e., good because of its effect on or for something else.
In a simple sense, then, Good is that which we prefer there to be, or have a pro-attitude toward, as an end-in-itself. But what is the definitive characteristic, substance or form of that? What is Good about that which we find valuable? That is what we want to find out.1
Now, there are two ways such a characteristic, substance or form can be, be in or be of that which makes something valuable for its own sake: It could either be a necessary characteristic, substance or form of the Good, or it could be a sufficient characteristic, substance or form of the Good. If it is a necessary condition of the Good, then its presence or existence is needed for there to be Good, and likewise, whenever there is the Good, it will be there, as Good could not come about in its absence. If it is instead a sufficient condition of the Good, then it is all that is needed for the Good—any and all specimen of such a characteristic, substance or form would be enough for there to be Good. An example: The presence of one X chromosome is a necessary characteristic for a male as well as a female, but it is not sufficient. The sufficient characteristic for a female is two X chromosomes, whereas the sufficient characteristic for a male is one single Y chromosome. One X chromosome is thus necessary but not sufficient to be able to tell a male, and one Y chromosome is neither necessary nor sufficient to be able to tell a female and both necessary and sufficient to be able to tell a male.
Thinking in such terms will allow for lucid, clear distillation of the concept of the Good. One of the most common mistakes of thought, even (or especially) practical thought, is thinking that something is sufficient when it is but necessary. Sometimes we also think that two things, X and Y, are both necessary for something just because they tend to go together, whereas in fact it’s only one of them that’s necessary (which doesn’t mean that it is sufficient, since there could be other things that are necessary as well, though if they aren’t, then it would be sufficient). Such mistakes prevent understanding what something truly is for its essence, and since it is precisely what makes for or defines the Good that we’re looking for—all such things that define it and without red herrings that distort the picture or add fluff to the distilled thing itself—proceeding with such scalpels of discernment will be of necessary value.
So now let us cover the array of things that we may find Good, or at least have some Goodness to them, and see what they have in common.
2. Contenders for Goodness
Talking about our preferences may be the simplest opening to think about what we may find to have noninstrumental value. We tend to have preferences, and we also often tend to believe they have some legitimacy to them. Though we live in such a nihilistic age that many would raise some pedantic objections to even the following examples, I think that most of us intuitively believe that our preferential judgments have something to do with what’s valuable or Good for its own sake, even if they are not always or directly about intrinsic Good; at least the very least, we may feel that our preferences relate to our happiness or well-being, which could be regarded as noninstrumentally valuable (a very important case we will soon be looking at).
Most would agree, for example, that pretty much any painting by J.M.W. Turner is better than anything I can paint (as long as those who may have some sentimental affection for my work don’t confuse the question of better with that of what they themselves like). Many may even go along with me in saying that a world full of champions, veritable Adonis-es and Hanumans and Aeneas-es and Yudhishtirs, would be simply a nicer world than one full of wimpy man-childs and losers. Or that a world in which there was a lot of high-quality tennis—a world that has had the likes of Novak Djokovic, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal—is better than one in which the best tennis was of the quality that I might play with my peers, or even one in which the highest quality tennis in the world was played by, say, today's Hubert Hurkacz, who in the grand scheme of things actually plays very good tennis. We might get used to the quality of a tennis-world in which the standard of tennis that everyone was trying to meet or surpass was that of current Hurkacz, but I think we would agree that there's just something better about a world in which the former echelon of players exists. That is, there is some quality that is intrinsically valuable, and which is present in greater measure or extent in the former than the latter.
It isn't just about such grand matters though that we think of the Good. Imagine you are on a train or bus and an old couple comes on, one with a walking stick, the other able to get by without one and lending a hand to the other as they get on, despite also being of clearly senescent strength and health. Now imagine two scenarios, one in which the people closest to the entrance, who are young and able-bodied, do not stand up to yield their seats for this elderly couple, who just stay standing there without making any fuss, and another in which they do yield their seats and the elderly couple, with sincerely expressed gratitude, take these seats, and are visibly glad to have been able to do so. There is something about the latter scenario that just strikes us as Good in a way that the former doesn't.
Imagine now that this couple gets off the train or bus at a train station or at the airport, where they travel to a family reunion. Their children are there, as well as their many grandchildren. They don't have perfect lives—and both of them have been around too long to really think perfectly happy lives can exist—and there are some cousins who like some uncles more than others and some aunts who aren't overwhelmed with joy or love on seeing some other aunts—but on the whole, as far as they know, their children and grandchildren have good lives—certainly as far as some essentials are considered: food on the table, a roof over the head, and no insecurity about these, which this couple knows as well cannot be treated trivially or taken for granted. They preside over this scene, and even as they sit quietly to the side while the younger ones engage in some activity requiring greater youth and youthful vigor, they see a job well done—a success even—and are happy. Most of us likely also find something preferable about this situation, compared to one in which they are presiding over a scene in which there is significant strife or suffering in the lives of most of their forebears, with the suffering that would cause them.
These are preferences that we may naturally tend to have. Based on these, we can come up with a few candidates for what, underlying these scenarios, we consider to be intrinsically Good. These would include (but not necessarily be exhausted by): Beauty; artistic quality; physical excellence; the ardent, unremitting pursuit of excellence; fairness; voluntary action; a well-knit social fabric; order; respect; honor; dignity; the fact of people get along, enjoy each other's company and love one another; the experience—i.e., as part of it—of getting along with people, enjoying one another's company and loving and being loved by others; the feeling “on the tongue” or “in the nervous system” of eating some delicious food, i.e., pleasant sensation; and success or accomplishment, whether of great glory or everyday uprightness, service and succor.
The question is: Which of these has a relation to the noninstrumentally Good, or is Good itself? To answer which, we need to know: What is that “Good itself?”
3. The Reigning Conception of the Good
Whether implicitly or explicitly, all societies operate with some conception of the Good, even if how that’s implemented or manifested is full of gaps. So let us start by examining the conception of the Good that reigns supreme in the sovereign culture of the day, which, at least for the West and increasingly for the rest of the world, is the liberal, humanist culture that is borne of the so-called “Enlightenment” and that undergirds “modernity”. After all, if we’re already got it, then there’s no need to worry about any of this.
To understand what we consider most or ultimately valuable, let me introduce another distinction: that between state-goodness and fact-goodness. State goodness would be a positive state as experienced. Fact goodness could be many things, but for this context, it would be positive experience not as experienced, but seen or observed. In other words, state is first-person, fact is third-person; or equivalently, state is subjective, fact is objective. The state of happiness is the actual feeling or experience of happiness, while the fact of happiness is happiness regarded from a third-person point-of-view (which could be one's own point-of-view toward one's own happiness). One can talk about “what it is like” to be in some state, but one cannot talk meaningfully about what it is like to be in some fact. One can be aware of a fact, and there is something it is like to be aware of that fact, but that—what it's like to be aware of that fact—isn't the fact itself, it's the experience or state of awareness of that fact.
That distinction made, we can see that among the contenders for bearing value that we looked at in the previous section, us well-behaved, well-adjusted moderns (or maybe it's just us postmoderns) tend to believe in, or at least focus on, one category within them more so than another. Namely, we consider positive states of experience as had by, in and for human organisms taken to be atomized individuals to be the Highest Good. We would also regard the fact of one's own or someone else's happiness as good—we can obviously contemplate on our states—but when on such contemplation we find that some state of existence is good, we find it so on account of the experience of that state, which is what we regard as inherently valuable.
This is demonstrated in the way that most of us live our lives, and even more so the way that our lives are narrativized and organized socially, i.e., through our economic, political and cultural processes. It can be seen in documents that form the bedrock of our modern (putative) wisdom, such as the American Bill of Rights or the Declaration of Human Rights, which lay down the central civilizational project of liberalism: Of maximizing human well-being or happiness, broadly defined. (By liberalism, I mean liberalism of the so-called “Enlightenment”, which includes most of the sociopolitical Overton window of the West, encompassing all of its left wing and most of its right wing). Explicitly or implicitly, our institutions and their ideology tell us that life is to be lived to experience happiness, and we try to optimize our individual choices and social arrangements, whether because of or in spite of our institutions, towards that end. Indeed, this particular axiology, i.e., theory of value, has become the air we breathe to such an extent that on reading the prior sentence, a well-adjusted person of this day and age may have had the reaction, “Well, of course life is to be lived to experience happiness, what else is life for?”
But is this actually the case? Is the experience of happiness or well-being the highest end that can be aspired towards? Faced with this idea, one may first of all think that there are so many ways in which happiness or well-being can be experienced, and wonder whether they would all be considered Good.
States of well-being can be found in the seemingly loftier experience of enjoying art and “high-brow” culture; however they can also be found in the supposedly more basic but yet pleasant experience of experiencing “low-brow” culture; however they may also be marked by pure agony, such as in the experience of hours of arduous physical training to achieve excellence in a sport, or in sacrificing festivities, nights out and broadly a vibrant social life to pursue with discipline and maximum effectiveness some other achievement in and of one's life, or in not getting a full, uninterrupted night of sleep for months if you have an infant, not to mention the pain of giving birth itself—but at the same time, of course, may consist in pure pleasure, from a nicotine buzz to orgasm. Or returning to our prior example, happiness would include experiences such as are felt by our imaginary elderly couple on seeing their whole family having fun together, i.e., experiences that we wouldn't consider shallow. But it would not exclude experiences that are of sensual pleasure, such as the nice feeling of eating the food the individuals ate at this imaginary feast, physical sensations that exist in-themselves, even if the setting adds to the cumulative happiness.
In the liberal, humanist “Enlightenment” worldview, these are all Good. The way that all the apparent diversity of experience is packaged as a coherent ideology is through belief in individual autonomy: If you say something makes you truly happy, then that's legitimate, and your overall happiness, including some voluntary pain as a necessary part of that, is what's Good. “If it makes you happy, then fine, it’s Good”—that is what we are to say for any instance of well-being we may encounter. (Kink-shaming is Bad, didn't you know?) Of course, there are qualifications to be made atop that: If you say something makes you truly happy and what you say doesn't infringe upon the autonomy and happiness of others, and so on... But on the whole, the idea is that if you say that something makes you happy, then all other things being equal, that should fly, because what matters, ultimately, is your happiness, whatever it may consist in for you.
In other words, we consider the experience of happiness to be all that’s necessary for there to be Good accomplished or “in the air”, i.e., we consider positive subjectivity a sufficient condition of the Good. Even if we can’t help but consider some experiences to have a depth or richness to them that we think make them just better in the grand scheme of possible experiences—say, the experience of spending time with a loved one—we don’t think that it would be legitimate to decide that other experiences—say, the enjoyment of munching down a bag of Doritos—are devoid of intrinsic value. All happiness or well-being is intrinsically valuable, including that derived from gorging on knock-off tortilla chips made out of low-protein corn (low-protein due to the preponderance of genetically modified corn among that which is used) fried in over-processed vegetable oils. As long as one avows that some subjective state is one of happiness or well-being, that’s good enough; indeed, then, there’s Good.
Note that I am not at this point ascribing to modern, liberal ideology the claim that only happiness is Good. That is, what we’re seeing is just that in liberal, humanist thought, state-happiness is sufficient for the Good, not that it is necessary. What we can say for now is that we live in a world in which we are inculcated to exist with an ideological compass that points to Good whenever there is happiness, even if not only when there is happiness. The ideology of the modern world can be summed up in this one sentence: What feels good is good, because feeling good is Good.
4. Onanism: The Exemplar of the Reigning Conception
So is the reigning conception correct? We believe, or at least are told, that all enjoyment or any kind of positive subjective state is Good. But is this so? The short answer is: No. The long answer is going to based on diving straight into an analysis of something that may make some readers uncomfortable: Masturbation.
There are two reasons why I’m choosing this example: The first is that for obvious evolutionary reasons, we’re designed such that the pleasure of orgasm is the most intense kind of common or natural pleasures; it increases dopamine roughly halfway between what is increased by eating chocolate and having cocaine (1.5 times above baseline for eating chocolate, twice over baseline for sex, 2.5 times above baseline for cocaine).
Explaining the second reason will make clear the point that gets made through the example: Unlike other forms of pleasure, masturbation is about pleasure and nothing else. With other highly stimulating activities, you may still be taking part in something that has some social element to it, that is a legit part of the world, even if you're doing it by yourself. For example, if you're playing a video game, you're still participating in and adding to gaming as a social phenomenon. Even if you're just shooting up snorting coke or smoking meth by yourself, as sad as that may be, you're still participating in and adding to a certain mythos in and of the world, that of drug-use. These are all in a way historical narratives, or memes, that you're in, and so pleasure isn't exhaustively what these acts are about. Even something as basic and rank as gorging down a bag of Doritos has historical or meme quality to it (Doritos and Mountain Dew anyone?) in a way getting comfortable in your room and pleasuring yourself does not.
There’s something unique about masturbation whereby it must be the most prevalent human activity that there isn’t any historical or meme quality about. (At least, this is the case for male masturbation.) We don’t talk about it. Even in the age of rampant pornography, no one talks about using it. I can imagine that a group of crack or heroin junkies aren’t all that cagey about their usage of their preferred substances; even with some degree of overt or covert disappointment in or frustration about oneself, the habit probably gets talked about. Except for very rare exceptions, no group of pornography addicts would even be aware of themselves as such, because it would be a coincidental assembly—no one talks about it and so no one recognizes anyone else as a pornography addict. Pornography makes for a multibillion dollar industry that is as much part of people’s lives as, say, the denim industry, but there is no first-person plural narrativization around the activities or wholesale lifestyle going on with it.
This is related to the feeling of emptiness that is commonly said to accompany masturbation, to the extent of shame that frequently accompanies pornography use. The reason for such feelings isn’t, as it politically correct to maintain, that we aren’t sex-positive enough as a society. It’s because we know that it’s doing nothing except generating pleasure in-and-for-oneself, and deep down somewhere, we don’t think there’s anything Good about that. (This doesn’t explain why, if we don’t think there’s anything Good about it, there’s instead an overtly negative feeling about it. That will actually be dealt with, though not necessarily directly, in the next installment of Vichara.) It’s obvious that it’s not just about not being sex-positive, because talk about sexual experiences involving other people goes on between friends quite often. We clearly aren’t against sexual pleasure; we just think there’s something really weird, in an unambiguously negative way, when it doesn’t have anything to do with any parts of reality apart from oneself.
(All that is said here about masturbation may be the case far more so for men. It may actually be significantly more because of cultural sex negativity, whether or not justified, that women feel shame about masturbation to the extent they do, and for those women that have deconditioned themselves of such sex negativity, my impression is that there is far less shame about masturbation and less aversion to discussing self-pleasuring between two or more female friends. This is seen in the fact that vibrators have much more visible societal presence, much more awareness of them as a thing that is just part of who we are as a collective, than the equivalent devices for men. This is also why videos by women and for women, such as for example ‘I touched myself for 1 year and this is what happened’ exist—there isn’t even the narrowest niche of such content for men. If this impression is correct, there’s a reason for this difference between how men and women regard masturbation that gets at essential, truly metaphysically foundational, differences between the sexes. Also, if that’s so (both my impression being correct and there being metaphysically foundational differences between the sexes), that may raise the very significant complication for this conception of the Good in that it might be one that’s by and for a more masculine human than a more feminine one, and with that, the Good at least at some resolution of description may be understood, experienced, embodied or engaged with differently depending on how masculine or feminine one is.)
One may still insist that while there may be some emptiness or shame that accompanies masturbation, the pleasure that is part of it is still Good, even if it has no effect on “external” reality, and in general, that feeling good in-itself, the very state of feeling good, regardless of its context, effect or anything, is Good.2 To dispel of the idea that we find anything Good about any positive experience in-and-by-itself, I propose a thought experiment, one involving the example yet again of masturbation, since it is again the quintessential form of pleasurable experience that, if it is Good, is so only on account of the first-person subjective state of pleasure it involves—there is no other reason why it may be Good.
So, let's consider a scenario in which one instance of masturbation is removed from the world or doesn't take place. Would you think the world is any worse off, that things are less Good, for that? If you don't because that's just a drop in the ocean, not big enough to arouse any meaningful sentiment, then let's go further: How about a world in which there is half of the masturbation, and resultant pleasure thereof, than there is in the current world? Now that's going to be a nontrivial dent in the total amount of pleasure experienced in the world. Would you think there's anything bad about that going away or not taking place? I don't think most of you would. In fact, we can go even further: Would you think that the world would be any worse if there was no masturbation at all in it? If we just weren't wired like that, if it didn't come to us to get off just by ourselves, if we could only experience arousal with another person, would that be a worse world? The only sense in which I think one could see that as a loss is from a third-person perspective—there's something interesting or fascinating about masturbation as a phenomenon itself, and if it didn't exist, the world would be ever so slightly less rich for its wealth of strange, varied phenomena. But that’s a loss of the fact of the matter, not the state of the matter; I don't think it comes naturally to us to see the forgone pleasure, i.e., the loss of all that experience of being in a state of pleasure, as a meaningful loss.
The scenario could be taken in the other direction: What if instead of the amount of masturbation there is in the world today there would be twice as much, and what if we could get to twice as much just by replacing painful experiences—toe-stubbings, ego-stubbings and the like—with masturbation. Do we really feel like that would be a better world? We can go to the extreme even with this example: What about a world in which all negative experiences and all less positive experiences—i.e., in terms of spikes of various “happy” brain chemicals—could be replaced with the intensity of the positive experience of orgasm, all the time? (Let us assume, following Robert Nozick in his similar Experience Machine thought experiment, that there would not be hedonic adaptation, that we have some technology whereby we could reset back to our baseline sensitivity over and over again.) In contrast to the other extreme (where there is no masturbation), here I think the answer comes easily: No, that would be a tragic state of affairs if all that was going on about humanity was masturbation and we didn't do anything else.
What’s going on here is that we see that pleasure-in-and-by-itself doesn’t matter, or doesn’t have any implication on “objective” reality, and so, we don’t think there’s anything Good about it. This element of objectively mattering, whatever that exactly is, seems to be a core part of what’s Good. We don’t think something is Good unless it’s part of the being and becoming of the world from the point-of-view, as it were, of the universe, unless it has an objective component or has fact-goodness (as opposed to, or on top of state-goodness).
Yet we live in a world that avers as an ideology that positive experience is intrinsically valuable, or Good as an end-in-itself. This leads us down troublesome paths that are inconducive to both individual and collective flourishing. We think we are living lives and organizing a society that is about what’s really Good, but it’s not, and that is bad, because we could be living lives and organizing a society that is about what’s really Good, doing which would, by definition, be Good. As such, having some sense of what isn’t (sufficient for) the Good, it behooves us to try and figure out what is Good.
5. The Necessity of Objectivity
There are effectively four questions that we are working with in this essay, and here is where we stand with respect to them:
Is positive subjectivity sufficient for the Good? No.
Is positive subjectivity necessary for the Good? We don’t know yet.
Is positive objectivity sufficient for the Good? We don’t know yet.
Is positive objectivity necessary for the Good? It seems so.
We have seen that though we aver it as an ideology, it isn’t the case that we actually find positive experience to be intrinsically valuable, or Good as an end-in-itself. This is seen most clearly through the most pure case of pleasure, that of masturbation. Pleasure is just one form of positive experience, but it is one form of positive experience, and seeing that we don’t find it to be Good, we can infer that we don’t actually find positive experience itself to be Good. Now, this doesn’t mean that we don’t find positive experience to be at all related to Good; it just means that we don’t find it to be a sufficient condition for Goodness; we don’t think that Goodness overlaps perfectly with just positive experience. It’s not the full picture. Whatever the Good is, it’s something that has some dimension apart from feeling good.
Now, if feeling good, or positive subjective experience, isn’t in-and-by-itself what’s good, if it’s the state that feels good isn’t enough for there to be Good, then the Good must be something that requires positive objective existence, or something good that can be seen for the fact of it. This follows logically from the insufficiency of positive subjectivity. If positive subjectivity doesn’t cut it, then it must be positive objectivity that is also required (since “positive” is given if we’re talking about the Good, and if it’s not subjectivity, the only remaining option is objectivity).
This is also seen from the sense we derived earlier about masturbation, that we don’t find the pleasure there to be of value because it doesn’t “matter” or do anything in and for the world from a third-person point-of-view. It’s not that pleasure can’t be part of what’s Good, but considering the case of pure pleasure devoid of any effect or involvement in the world, it seems that we are naturally disinclined to think of it as part of the Good if it doesn’t have an objective component to it, if it doesn’t “matter” in some way, i.e. matter objectively.
This is how it seems. But apart from rationally arriving at a deduction—i.e., coming to to think “It could only work if this was true”—can we see positively, for the thing itself, that some objective component of goodness is necessarily there whenever we apprehend the Good?
To see so, let us return to our imaginary scenario of the elderly couple going to and being at their family reunion. There were things about that which would speak to almost all of us in our deepest bones and joints, I would wager, as being just Good. For example, the little happening of the two people who gave their seats for the elderly couple, and the generation and transpiring of various energies of service, respect, gratitude and happiness that were part of that incident may strike us as Good in a way that we don’t need them to have existed for some other purpose, thereby being Good as ends-in-themselves, which would make us content about reality.
Also in that scenario, we conjured fondness that various family members had for one another. This fondness, we saw realistically, existed in differing degrees depending on the exact relationship. We also saw that they are all in some or the other relative states of flourishing, for the most part and in their own ways. Getting along with others and having a normally good life make for an existence of happiness. But is this happiness Good in-itself? Is it just the good feeling coming out of good relationships that matters? Is it just feeling good about having a decent life that matters? Or does the existence of good relationships themselves and the decent life itself, as things that actually exist in the world, matter as well? One may say that those attainments only matter because of the good feelings they lead to. But we have already seen that it isn’t just the good feelings that matter—including in cases such as these. The grandparents there, for example, if they were aware of one or more of their grandchildren not actually having a decent life (for whatever that normally involves), likely wouldn’t be thrilled at the prospect, if it could exist, of those kids being able to be sedated and connected to a simulation in which they would be fed the feelings that one may have on flourishing. That just wouldn’t cut it. There seems to be some value that we feel to exist in some flourishing actually existing in the world, i.e., for the fact of that.
This extends to the fondness felt by people for one another as well. We aren’t glad about the existence of some other people either because we are happy about how their existence must feel for them, or because of the state of happiness we ourselves get on account of their existence. Their existence may be happy, and their existence may also make you happy, but it isn’t for either state of happiness that we affirm the existence of those whom we truly love. Indeed, we want them to be happy because we already consider their existence to have intrinsic value, and thus deserving of the honor of happiness. The two elders of the family, again, love their children and grandchildren not because there is happiness in the existence of the latter, or even because they themselves get happiness from them. Rather, they are simply glad that those people exist, and find that existence Good for its own sake, on top of the experiential states it may involve for those people or for themselves. This is clear from the fact that we can very easily imagine that despite knowing that they will probably die before their descendants, they would very strongly will the continued existence of their descendants even when they wouldn’t be able to personally enjoy it.
Now, one may say, all that about interpersonal behavior and long-term flourishing and what not is all well and good, but there is something just good about the pleasure experienced by the family members eating the delicious food that they do at their gathering. Indeed, we may legitimately find that experience of enjoying the food that family is having to be of value not for something else, but in-and-of-itself. But even here, it’s not the experience of pleasure itself (and nothing else) that we’re still finding good. What we are finding Good about this happening is that there is the having of such pleasure in that given social context. The having of pleasure, in this case, is meaningful in some way. We do find pleasure to be something that is Good, but only as part of a meaningful process or event of the world, as the capstone, as it were, of such a process or event, which thereby marks, signifies or simply makes that process or event something special.3 Without that, it’s just masturbation (metaphorically in this case, but truly nevertheless).
Let me add one more element to this scenario: Imagine that the proprietors of the place that this family reunion is taking place, some beautiful villa or park, have hired a violinist to play live. It so happens that this violinist isn’t an adult, but a young girl who couldn’t be more than 12 or so. The music, though only a few among those gathered there can appreciate the fact, is far from what an average 10-, 11- or 12-year-old would be playing. This girl is a prodigy. For those who have learnt to pay attention to these things, there’s the awe-inspiring speculation, as she sashays through Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas, that she may be performing on the highest among high stages within just some years, and as she concludes her session with the Chaconne, they realize they may have just been privy to a veritable future Arthur Grumiaux. The music they found to be nearly (she isn’t a virtuoso just yet) staggering, and the very fact of this person and performance they find amazing. In admiring a work of art such, they are simply happy that there is such existence: of the work in its original composition and current rendition, of the artist in all the qualities she demonstrates. There is nothing it has to be good for—it is itself Good. And to be clear, it’s not their positive experience of it that they are valuing as the thing that they want to exist for its own sake, it’s the art, and they are having some positive experience because they are beholding something that they consider Good.
All of the above cases of Goodness, we can see, have some objective component. Moreover, it doesn’t seem that we would find them Good without that component. The state of enjoying something—say the music, or the company—is not itself Good, and is insufficient for marking that music or the company as Good; without the factor that these things actually exist objectively, that thereby the enjoyment is a meaningful part of and extension of the world, there is no Good. So we can now say both deductively and inductively that something objectively positive, i.e., something of value that can be seen from a third-person perspective or the perspective of the universe, is necessary for there to be Good.
But what is that “something” of value? The dominant conception of the Good at least has a positive picture it offers (“positive” meant here not in the sense of value, but in the sense of something being there, a la the positive and negative of a film). Namely, the “something” of Goodness is happiness or well-being of individuals however they define it for themselves. Even if that isn’t perfectly correct a conception, it’s at least a fleshed-out attempt at an answer. We have seen that some objectivity is necessary for there to be Good. But as it has been held that happiness writ large is the kind of subjectivity or state-existence that makes for the Good, what kind of objectivity makes for the Good?
6. The Rare and the Rarefied
To get at that, let us start with the most minimal, basic or simple attribute of an objective nature that is had in common by all the contenders for non-instrumental Goodness that we’ve examined above, from those of the scenario just prior to the preferences we started by expressing.
One very basic way to articulate what we’re seeing in these cases is that they strike us as special in some way. It may be that when things are Good, they are special, or that when things are special, they come across as Good. All the things we find Good seem one-of-a-kind, or at least among a few-of-a-kind—simply put, rare. This is not to say that rareness is itself necessarily the constitutive property, substance or form of the Good. All that is being claimed right now is that it is co-occurrent; whenever something strikes us as having intrinsic value, there happens to also be something about it that we can see as rare, unlikely or unique. Simply put, all we can say so far is it’s Good not necessarily because it’s rare; it’s Good when it’s rare.
This is most apparent in the case of “out there” things. When we see a champion human, or a (potentially) champion human, or champion performance or work of utmost excellence, this simply stands out from the rest of reality in a clear, striking way. There are ordinary violin performances (and frequently sub-ordinary violin performances if the performer is 10) and there are performances getting at virtuosity. There is the tune you or I may come up with fiddling about with a fiddlestick and a fiddle, and there is Bach’s Chaconne. In being amazed by the latter kinds of things, we have the thought, at some level of consciousness, that “How can something like this exist?”, where “something like this” gets at something standing out or apart from the rest of reality in a remarkable, different, rare way.
Also when we appreciate or admire the very existence or fact of someone (rather than the state of being them or the state they put you in), whether or not they are truly rare (however we may “objectively” measure such a thing), we tend to see them as remarkable in much the same way. We are captivated or blown away by the very being of a person whom we regard as just so very special, such a wonder, as a gem of a person—i.e., in ways in which we take a third-person point-of-view towards their existence. We want them to be exist not because of their utility for something else (even one’s own happiness) but simply as ends-in-themselves, and in this case of willing the existence of some entities as ends-in-themselves as well, it appears that their perceived rareness plays a significant role.
But while this trait of specialness or rareness, which is necessarily an objective trait, seems like it is integrally related to the objective Goodness of something, another one of the cases we had examined may throw a wrench in this idea. Going back to our bus scene, when the elderly couple had seats given up for them and everyone was happy, it is apparent that such a scene playing out isn’t (thankfully) exactly rare in our world in the way that, say, a prodigal violinist would be.
So what gives? There are a few possibilities. One is simply that rareness simply isn’t the necessary objective factor of the Good, and thus isn’t a common feature of the Good; before settling on this one, let us examine other possibilities. Another one among these is that we are mistaken in finding the emotions and actions that play out in that scene, as well as the playing-out of the scene itself, to be intrinsically valuable. This one is interesting, especially insofar as it could be a matter of being more precise about what exactly we find intrinsically valuable in that scene: The emotional states, the facts of certain actions, or the totality, the scene of all of it? We will come back to some greater clarity on this, but I don’t think that it’s entirely the case that there isn’t anything intrinsically valuable about anything about this scenario. When we witness such social acts and are aware of the emotions they give rise to, they tend to warm our hearts in a way wherein we are valuing those happenings for their own sake.4
The possibility that I want to look into, though, is that there is in fact something rare going on here, it’s just not where we’re looking for it. Namely, when we see such social dance, not just for its outward behavior but also with sincere and authentic emotions, we are seeing a society, or a world, of a certain quality or attainment that strikes us in some strange way as “rare” at a fundamental metaphysical level. Specifically, the existence of a world in which such phenomena are not rare is itself rare among all the worlds that there could have been, and we register that. The rareness of such a world cannot be beheld for its entirety, or in-itself, since we cannot at once behold the whole world for all its particularity. It can, however, be seen in or about such incidents, which showcase to us certain values and states that make for a counterfactually rare world.
Still, even if it’s counterfactually rare, i.e., if it’s unlikely that this world would come about among all the other worlds that could have been, it’s not exactly “rare” in the sense that “rare” denotes something that has low occurrence among existing alternatives. While of course, there can only be one of this world (in a single time-space reality), and so it doesn’t quite make sense to speak of it as rare. Yet we do find it special and remarkable, and with that, intrinsically valuable. What is it that we’re seeing that leads us to have this sense? For what attribute or nexus of attributes is it rare?
In a word, when we are seeing something as Good, we aren’t just seeing it as rare, but as rarefied. To understand this, let’s start with an example from the world of atoms. It’s not just that the City Palace of Udaipur, say, is quantitatively rarer than your typical Indian housing colony, or that the Villa Savoye is quantitatively rarer than your average McMansion. Of course the former entities are quantitatively rarer. But along with that, they are in their very being, more remarkable or more of a break with the average case of undifferentiated or low-level differentiated reality. Such entities mark a further extent of what reality can be in terms of its structure and function (these two being exhaustive of what physical reality is), and of what information and qualia may go on with that (with those two exhausting perhaps all there is about physical and nonphysical reality), an extent that happens to be more rare, closer to unique or singular, than the average case or a reality residing at the lowest common denominator, which it has left behind in going to the extent.
Such differences in the nature of things can also exist for actions and emotions. The average composite of those that makes up a social moment is, well, average. However, the voluntary self-surrender for entities deemed more noble, precious or significant, the very existence of an act of generosity, the specific kind of graciousness and joy that arises in a person when they are confronted with an act of generosity—these are all things that are very un-average and rarefied. Moreover, these are not so because of the frequency of their occurrence, i.e., because they occur fewer times than other, average things, like, say, the feeling of relief on getting a seat that’s already open. Rather, there is about them something that has more going on with its structure, function, information and qualia, and it so happens that this going-on often comes about with less quantitative occurrence than it does for average things.
But what specifically is rarefied about the thoughts, feelings and deeds we’ve been imagining on this bus? Is it the facts of the matter or the state of being in it? Is it the deeds or the feelings? Are the actions and emotions of that situation rarefied because they are about a counterfactually rare world? Or is the world rare, and the situation thus rarefied, because it contains actions and emotions that are themselves rarefied? What is it that we find just Good about all this?
Let us try to answer all that by biting off and chewing on the smallest and most apparent piece of the puzzle possible: Why do the two younger, able-bodied people on that bus give up their seats for the elderly couple? What is the thing of non-instrumental value that they hope to bring about with that action and that we apprehend when we see it? The most obvious possibility is that they are trying to bring about the happiness of the elderly couple. Now, it is true that the happiness of that couple is part of the picture. But that’s not so only because their physical comfort is important or valuable, at least in-itself. If were just a matter of the more able-bodied, fit or comfortable making space for the less able-bodied, fit or comfortable, we would have our hearts warmed as much by a scenario in which a bunch of college students who have just spent a few hours studying in the library give up their seats for a bunch of other college students who have spent time in the gym working out, or a scenario in which one able-bodied young person gives up their seat for another young person who seems overall healthy and fit but has their ankle or leg in a brace, indicating some injury. But we don’t. In the first scenario, we don’t even expect the library-departed people to give seating space to the gym-departed people. In the second, we would find it good and kind, but I doubt it would warm our hearts to the same degree; we simply expect something like that to happen in any social setting that has basic sense about it, and don’t find the actions in that situation or the feelings of gratitude or comfort experienced by the injured young person to be just Good in the same way.
Rather, we find it more beautiful, rarefied or simply Good when the happiness of people in that specific sociobiological position of the elderly is brought about. It’s specifically honoring an elder with that happiness that we consider having correspondence to the Good.5 It’s almost as if in that case there is some discharge or fulfillment of cosmic-level dues. It is as if we are indebted to the elderly in some way, and in the social dance of us taking care of their physical well-being of honoring them with our seats, we are recognizing and paying that debt.
What are we indebted for? It is for having passed us down the amazing world we inhere in—a world of entities like the Chaconne and organisms we love, and indeed of such dignity and dance as well—there is recursivity here. This is a world of such extreme differentiation, complexity and rare-fication compared to a basic, dull reality that we could have been handed, and we honor the elderly for having been custodians and creators of that inheritance.
The states of graciousness and gratitude that come about in our scenario contain awareness of all of this at some level. On both sides, there is an awareness of a rarefied world. The state is thus not just pure sensation; it is colored by information. All the behavior and experience going on there contains, reflects and further affirms a world that is rarefied in the way just described. And the world is rarefied in part, recursively, due to the existence of these dynamics, these deeds and subjective states that are rarefied on account of bearing the information of such a beautiful world. This recursivity makes this world all the more rarefied, much as there is far greater richness to the images visible in a hall of mirrors as opposed to standing in front of a mirror with a plain wall behind one: The world we inherit includes the subjectivity that is aware of and honors such a world, which is a world which includes the subjectivity that is aware of and honors such a world, which is… ultimately something very rich and rarefied. The counterfactually rare world we perceive when we see such social dance is perceived as such because a world in which there is such social dance is rarefied, because of all the concepts and images of rarefication embedded in the playing out of that dance, and thus rare.
So, for our string of questions a few paragraphs up about what we find Good about that scene, the answer is: All of it. We find that whole social dance to be non-instrumentally something whose existence we want and we find it rarefied; we find it rarefied because within it there is a concept of a full, rarefied world, which includes such rarefied social dance—and we want all that objectivity to exist: The objectivity of that rich and rarefied world as a whole, the objectivity of the action of giving up one’s seat (for containing in its motivating cognition the idea of that rich and rarefied world), the feelings on both sides that are elicited by that action (again for the rarefied idea they contain)—all of them have that objective element, the rarefied.
So if there has to be something objective, i.e., something whose existence can be experienced from a third-person perspective, for there to be Good, here we have it: We find the qualitatively rarefied and quantitatively rare, to be special, and through finding it special, we find it Good, or something whose existence we will for its own sake. We focused just now on the bus scenario, but the same applies for the prior cases we looked at as well, as seen through the architecture example; even for people whom we love, we know them in such a way that we see something ineffably, uniquely rarefied about them, which is again captured when we call someone, say, “a gem of a person”. This also fits with the prior discussion we had of masturbation and the point we arrived at through it that subjective sensation in-and-by-itself is besides the point when it comes to the Good; in that case, there is nothing rarefied that is contained or affirmed, and hence nothing objective about it, so it makes sense that we don’t find it to be of intrinsic value. To repeat, the claim at this point is not that the rare or the rarefied is constitutive or definitive of intrinsic value, but that it is something that is there when we find things Good. Moreover, it is something of an objective dimension, and it appears to be there whenever we find something to have intrinsic, non-instrumental value, showing that it (and thus, objectivity in general) is at least a necessary condition of the Good.
But here we are well-placed to ask another question. We saw that even in the bus scenario, where there were subjective states at play, everything that seemed to contribute to the non-instrumental value of the scenario was of an objective nature. The graciousness and gratitude of that scenario do strike to have Goodness, but only insofar as they contain in them and affirm a rarefied world; such containment and affirmation cannot be felt, but is an objective dimension. Broadly, for the Good that we’ve seen in and of various scenes, it is for that the rare or rarefied quality. So it can be asked: Is the subjective dimension even necessary? Or is objectivity, whether its ultimate content or form is the rare, rarefied or something else, is sufficient for there to be the Good?
7. Mars: The Insufficiency of the Objectivity
Imagine now a new scenario—one in which we built a world on Mars. From terraforming the land into lush, live ecosystems, to establishing settlements that lived in harmony and foresight with them, to having dynamic economic and cultural production and distribution—let’s say we did it. Except, with one catch: Namely, that the inhabitants of this land aren’t real people, but replicas of humans who act just like humans but don’t have any consciousness or subjectivity.
I raise the case of the philosophical zombie, the entity that can be conceived to be physically just like a human, including for its behavior, but experiences nothing. The zombie may sweat when it’s hot, even wipe its forehead with an exasperated look on its face, but there’s no experience of feeling hot; it is merely acting in a way where given physical input X, it would give back physical output Y.
Now in this Mars scenario, for whatever reason, we found that it would not be possible or desirable to actually put humans on Mars. But some company or organization or intergovernmental initiative decided it would at least be cool if we could create a simulation of the most awesome human society on Mars, and so that was done. So we can sit on our sofas on Earth, and turn on the TV to watch these zombie Martians go about building upon what we set up for them: They build marvelous works of architecture, they plan and steward entire an entire noosphere wedding together carbon with all other elements into the most prolific narratives of becoming, they go to nature parks and symphonies and weep at the beauty of what they experience, they build further space technology capable of going further into solar system and beyond. But as they are doing all this, they are experiencing nothing.
Does this strike you as desirable? It does seem cool, and even to me, it seems doesn’t necessarily seem obviously undesirable compared to a big lifeless planet (though there is also something sublime and incredible just about Mars as it is). However, think again in terms of counterfactuals, i.e., in terms of what could otherwise be. Compared to a world in which real humans were there, I doubt any of us would prefer the scenario of zombies on Mars. Indeed, if real humans were to shape that amazing future, we may even think that is such a fantastic enough development of reality that it “justifies itself”, doesn’t have to have any purpose beyond its own existence, i.e., we may find it Good. Whereas if it were just zombies, we may have a lingering sense of disappointment or dissatisfaction, whenever we watch the feed from outer space, to the effect of wondering “Well, what’s this good for?”—a sensibility of doubt which inherently means that we don’t think that is the ultimate Good.
Such a scenario strongly indicates that we find the subjective component also necessary when we find something to be Good. No matter how rare or rarefied some fragment of reality is, if it exists dissociated from any subjective experience, then we don’t find it to be truly intrinsically valuable. This subjective component isn’t happiness or well-being in any or all form, as we saw earlier. That decidedly doesn’t cut it as a sufficient criterion for the Good. However, there is something about subjectivity that is necessary along with objective value for there to be a full manifestation of the Good.
In a way, we already saw this through some past examples we went through. This was most obvious in the case where we saw how we value the fact of certain people just for their existence, regardless of their contingent subjective state or the state they elicit in us. We would not be satisfied if these were replicas of the people we love that are devoid of subjectivity. Though it isn’t positive affect they experience (or that we experience due to them) that we find of sole or sufficient ultimate value, we don’t see ultimate value without some subjectivity, even though we want that subjectivity also to be objective.
When we looked at the component of pleasure derived from eating delicious food in the imaginary banquet we were flies on the wall to, we saw that if we found that whole happening Good, it was because of the layer of social bonds and togetherness that were going on then as well, not just because of the pleasure. The following will developed more in the next essay, but despite that point of objectivity being necessary, it can also be observed that there is no way for such objectivity to come across as Good without some subjective component. Whether it’s through the near-ritual-like signification conferred on the event by the consumption of good food, or simply some other kind of happiness, the fact of some positive subjective state is necessary for marking and seeing that social reality as Good.
But what about beings or becomings that aren’t people or don’t have people as an apparently definitive part of them, such as the music played by the prodigal violinist, or the Villa Savoye? We already saw that it is the music or architecture themselves that we value in these cases, and the experiences of happiness that go along with them are because we find those works to be just Good. Answering this fully requires specifying what it is about subjectivity that is a feature of or along with the Good (as we have so far seen into the rare and the rarefied for the case of valuable objectivity), which we will not do today. But such subjectivity or spirit is such that “the music or architecture themselves” can only be talked about for both their objective and subjective components. It’s meaningless to say that the existence of the Villa Savoye or an impassioned+skillful performance of Bach’s Chaconne can be seen as an objective thing in-and-of-itself. Human spirit is spliced in and through all such entities.
But that raises the question: Isn’t a Mars populated by zombies also Good then? It is, after all, going to be a human creation with the subjectivity that led to it contained in its being. The answer to this also requires an account of what exactly about subjectivity is valuable. However, it can be said that whether it’s the Villa Savoye or a full-fledged civilization on Mars, they are Good just as beings and becomings in a social, i.e., a subjective context. The initial creation of that Martian world could well be a genuinely amazing project, because it is connected to real, vital spirit. But once it’s launched, and launched into space, to the extent its further unfolding is just mechanical, we don’t really see any point to it. It’s then largely disconnected from a context in which there is actual subjectivity (and autonomous will, though that’s a separate, loaded conversation), and so we don’t see it as a thing with both an objective and subjective component of value. The subjective component isn’t fully lacking, because our traces would still be perceptible in the unfolding of this world no matter what, but compared to the counterfactual in which real humans are on Mars, or compared to a scenario in which the Villa Savoye or Bach’s Chaconne are part of society, part of the causal back-and-forth of subjectivity and objectivity that makes up history, we don’t find the zombie Mars to have value.6
8. Epilogue: The Mad and the Auspicious
This is what we have found:
Is positive subjectivity sufficient for the Good? No.
Is positive subjectivity necessary for the Good? Yes.
Is positive objectivity sufficient for the Good? No.
Is positive objectivity necessary for the Good? Yes.
This is but a preliminary specification of the Good; it is hardly a fleshed-out, or dare I say sufficient account of the Good to say the Good is positive subjectivity and positive objectivity. That would beg the question, “What kind of positive subjectivity and objectivity?”, and indeed, the question will draw us further in future installments of Vichara.
However, coming to even this much clarity is of great significance. This is especially on account of one of the pairs of facts settled above: That of the insufficiency of subjectivity, and the necessity of objectivity. We have found that the Good, whatever it is, involves a positive that can be seen for the fact of it, i.e., an objective aspect of existence that there can be awareness of from a third-person perspective, not just a positive state. Indeed, as we saw, we don’t find anything Good about positive experience itself.
This is, if true, big. It’s big because our whole world is organized around the ideal of feeling good in-and-for-itself. Our institutions and infrastructures all valorize and are designed to organize us in a way that (purportedly) maximizes the state of individual happiness or well-being. The current notion of the Good is that positive subjectivity is itself sufficient for the Good—while in fact it is not in-itself, without an objective dimension, of any value. As such, our world is built upon a fundamental error, which ironically is the basis of a lot of suffering that characterizes the modern existence.7 Insofar as we do operate in a way that treats happiness qua happiness as the sole and sufficient measure of the good—which is how we largely operate—we live in a mad world. But with that—as big, if true—it follows that it would make sense to build a world in which a ruling order, executing our systems of governance, production, distribution and overseeing our cultural processes, does instead get it right, i.e., is based on and oriented around not just maximizing feeling good for each of us, but something more than that.
What would that look like? The answer to this would not be given by philosophy, but by the endless anthesis of civilization and the praxes of systems of all scales within it. Which is to say, it is an answer to be manifested by us with curiosity, wits and gusto through our discovery of it. But based on what we have seen today, we can at least tell that it will have things that are excellent or extraordinary to some faculty of perception or reception: from heroes such as the Yudhishtirs and Aeneases of legend and lore to artistic prodigies such as Hilary Hahn and champions of sport such as Novak Djokovic; from marvelous structures and infrastructures such as the Netherlands’ Delta Works, the Burj Khalifa and the global network of submarine fiber-optic cables to the most miraculously efficacious regimes and orders that collide paragons of past days into our present consciousness and so produce our relish and our will for the future, such as the Pax Romana, the Gupta Golden Age, the US-led-and-enforced global system of trade that has existed in the last 75 years, and that which will succeed it.
However, along with such wonders that a cosmic eye could delight in, there would also be, in this reality of Good realized, the most profound and the most elevated subjectivities: Loves, fortitudes and braveries of epic magnitudes; exquisite exertions, prévenances and melancholies; all the motions and maelstroms of heart, mind, flesh and soul that can be experienced and yet cohered into vectors of dazzling objectivity. There would be great celebrations and bereavements, transpiring within the vast maturity of peoples who know that the one always contains the shadow of the other, and who thus comprehend the commerce of creation and destruction, the intercourse of making and breaking, the oneness of taking and leaving, and the coils of pain and prowess—who, thereby, come into consciousness as being the movement of the awesome, chilling spirit that fathoms, subsumes and transcends time itself, and that is thus beyond beginning and end, beyond any articulatable content or form.
But what could such fine words mean for civilization today? What is the most meaningful yet far horizon we can look to? Is even Mars a realistic prospect for us? It is a strange but delectable feature of Sanskrit and languages derived from it that the word mangal (pronounced as in this song8) means both “auspicious” and “Mars”. When we wish mangal upon the world and its being, we wish what may be to us today a near-utopic level of well-being, both objective and subjective—the kind that would come about of the Kingdom of Heaven, say, or Ramrajya.
But wouldn’t it be amazing if humans, us silly featherless bipeds possessed yet of inscrutable wizardry and grace, could take it beyond the palisades of our sky? Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could bring about both peace and glory, both felicity and splendor, and that too on agglommerations of matter far, far away? Wouldn’t it be truly Good if we could be happy, but also be great, and be so beyond the coordinates, cut out by our odds, for our physical incarnations? Wouldn’t be it Good if we could have the greatest existence subjectively and objectively? Indeed, where we stand today, Mars, but as Mangal—pure auspiciousness—may truly be the limit of the Good that we can realize—albeit a limit only mathematically understood, for who knows what ultimate value, what objectivity of the experience of purport, power and passion, what subjectivity of immaculately ordered entropy, what extent there may be to ever end up reaching.
To be continued…
Everything that follows may just in some way be contained in or entailed by this framing of noninstrumentality. With that, if we don't arrive at an answer that feels right and is logically sound, then we may just not have clarified the question well enough.
This argument may be accompanied by a defense regarding the “regardless of context or effect” qualification, for example that there can be something about the context or effect of some pleasure that makes the overall event of pleasure-experience not on the whole Good, for example, if someone takes pleasure in watching the suffering of others, then that event of pleasure may not be Good, but such pleasure, by itself, is Good.
This is a very important point about pleasure and the way in which a life with pleasure and “normal” enjoyments could be Good, and will be a core part of the following installment of Vichara.
There are possibly two great biases in this essay. One is the covered in section 4 above regarding the sexes; it is possible that I am speaking from a distinctly masculine frame, and thus would be presenting ideas that seem coherent, or at least significant, to those inhering in the world with a masculine frame. The other is that I may just be feeling that it may be a particularly Eastern, or more specifically, non-Western, or even more specifically, non-Northern-Atlantic, sentiment I have regarding the scene such as the one I’m examining. Indeed, it’s likely that this example has stayed a constant lately as I think through things precisely because everyday, I take public transportation in a major Western city, and regularly see many if not most of its seated riders be indifferent to the elderly walking onto a packed train car, which I find repugnant but which clearly lots of people do not. So it’s possible that some of my Western readers may not find anything rather heart-warming, let alone intrinsically valuable, about such a scenario playing out.
Insofar as this is a blemish (and blind-spot, from there) particularly of Western society today, I wish to clarify that I do not think it to be an intrinsic or deeply/historically embedded shortcoming of Western or European culture(s) in general. It is almost certainly a problem, rather, of modern, liberal or individualistic society, which happens to have been established most firmly in the West (due historical contingencies, eco-geographical dynamics and myriad metamemes that weren’t exhaustively constitutive of the sum of the culture of the West) and are taking over the world outside of the West too; it is not inconceivable that the indifference I observe here could become commonplace in the East in some decades. It is but industrial economies, to simplify greatly, that make possible the luxury of laissez-faire, self-interested individuality, which in all cultures, including those of Europe until the most centuries, would have been horribly maladaptive and couldn’t possibly, for most of the course of history, have been part of the memetic coding of cultures.
Specifically, perhaps, but not exclusively: We also find it heartwarming when we give small children happiness that is appropriate for them in that moment (i.e., that would also be good for them and isn’t just something they’re throwing a tantrum for). This actually gets at another reason, apart from the one presented above, why contributing to the happiness of the elderly has something purer about it than that of a younger adult: There is a purity of the soul that is only found in children and the very old, which we consider to be more proximate to the Ultimate or Absolute or Divine than the taintedness of the average, worldly person, and which we thus consider more worthwhile to honor. Keeping with the Bach motif of this essay, Bernard Chazelle described in a discussion in a conversation with The On Being Project how Bach’s music is unique in that it also concerns itself only with that purer realm of emotions: “As opposed to other composers, Bach targets the very young, the child, and people of a certain age, like me. And tries to leave out the middle. What I mean by this is that there are all kinds of mental, psychological dispositions from the opera that he totally shunned. Envy. Greed. Lust. Jealousy. I mean, this is the bread and butter of the opera. He never went there. He had no interest in that. His music tries to express things like, awe. Grace. Thanks. Fear. Trepidation. Hope. All kinds of sentiments a child can have, and an older person can have, but none of this sexual nonsense in the middle.”
Indeed, it’s a relevant question here even whether the zombies could create something with the complexity or qualitative rareness of the Villa Savoye, given the lack of subjectivity in that scenario. This is one of the big questions of AI, and this particular slice of intelligence and energy through which this is being written holds to the increasingly unfashionable opinion that the zombies can’t truly create something new (newness being close to a necessary condition for the rare and the rarefied in a given moment of history), because that creative vitality only comes about in a context with subjectivity and consciousness.
This false conception of the Good may also be at the bottom of propping up institutions and infrastructures that are ill-disposed to do things in and of the world to address the sundry existential and catastrophic risks we face, and which we could take on if only our institutions weren't wired to optimize solely for subjectivity, regardless of what happens in the realm of atoms and bits.
If you are interested in the film the song comes from, it appears, as of August 2023, that it is officially available in full to watch on YouTube for free.
How is this essay not but an example of the Good itself? - it’s a spectacular aberration from the mundane reality! There is a LOT in there - like ‘ the mirror hall’ you describe .. reflection of reflection of reflection ... that goes back and forth between the essay and the reader. Brilliantly done.