In “Alain on Monasticism,” a stimulating Substack offering, my friend and philosopher extraordinaire Bill Vallicella (“Maverick Philosopher”) asked about the fruitfulness of arguing for or against a sense of life. The occasion was his recent re-reading of On Happiness by Émile-Auguste Chartier (1868-1951), whose nom de plume was Alain. My interest is not in Alain’s antipathy toward monkish existence but rather in Bill’s (apparent) ambivalence toward mere attitudes that imply (or entail) philosophical claims. Since I’ve probably misunderstood the problem Bill was cornering, I’m hoping that what I’ve written below will move him to set me straight. He writes:
Alain . . . frankly expresses his sense of life or sense of reality. I don’t share it, but can I argue against it? Does it even make sense to try to argue against it? Probably not. In a matter such as this, argument comes too late. Alain feels it in his guts and with his “whole being” that the religion of the mournful monks, the religion Alain himself was raised in, is world-flight and a life-denying sickness.
For a worldling such as Alain, the transient things of this world are as real as it gets, and all else is unreal. The impermanence of things and the brevity of life do not impress or shock him as they do someone with a religious sensibility.
In a Schlitz ad from yesteryear Bill finds this mood summed up:
. . . in the words of a 1970 beer commercial:
You only go around once in life
So you have to grab for all the gusto you can.
He continues:
The worldling’s attitude is a matter of sensibility and it is difficult and probably impossible to argue with anyone’s sensibility. I cannot argue you out of your sense of reality. Arguments come too late for that. In fact, arguments are often little more than articulations on the logical plane of a sensibility deep in the soul that was already in place before one attained explicit logical skills.
I would say he is. But how prove it either to him or to myself? Can one PROVE that God and the soul are real? That this life is a vanishing quantity unworthy of wholehearted devotion? That what really matters is beyond matter and beyond mind in its presently paltry and darkened state? Can one prove that we have an eternal destiny? No. At best one can give a number of plausible arguments for these ‘objects’ and a number of plausible arguments against metaphysical naturalism. But in the end, one is going to have to invoke certain mystical vouchsafings, intimations from Elsewhere, glimpses, revelations, teachings of some magisterium deemed finally authoritative, all of which are easily hauled before the bench of reason to have their veridicality questioned, and, I should add, in good faith. In the end, a leap of faith is needed. You will have to decide what to believe and how to live. You will have to decide whether to live in accordance with your sense of life, whether it be of the worldly sort or the otherworldly.
Here’s how a notable writer who shared Alain’s antipathy toward religion defined Bill’s key term:
A sense of life is a pre-conceptual equivalent of metaphysics, an
emotional, subconsciously integrated appraisal of man and of existence. It sets the nature of a man’s emotional responses and the essence of his character. Long before he is old enough to grasp such a concept as metaphysics, man makes choices, forms value-judgments, experiences emotions and acquires a certain implicit view of life. Every choice and value-judgment implies some estimate of himself and of the world around him—most particularly, of his capacity to deal with the world. He may draw conscious conclusions, which may be true or false; or he may remain mentally passive and merely react to events (i.e., merely feel). Whatever the case may be, his subconscious mechanism sums up his psychological activities, integrating his conclusions, reactions or evasions into an emotional sum that establishes a habitual pattern and becomes his automatic response to the world around him. What began as a series of single, discrete conclusions (or evasions) about his own particular problems, becomes a generalized feeling about existence, an implicit metaphysics with the compelling motivational power of a constant, basic emotion—an emotion which is part of all his other emotions and underlies all his experiences. This is a sense of life.
Ayn Rand, The Romantic Manifesto, 1969
(This excerpt may be found in The Ayn Rand Lexicon.)
I’d say that a “sense of life” corresponds to a “worldview,” a network of deep-seated, “non-negotiable” beliefs that govern one’s approach to one’s experience, but to which one may explicitly advert. It’s mostly “subterranean,” but can surface and be made an object of query, defense, and attack. That is, what may be felt to be non-negotiable can, under the pressure of inquiry, be elicited and even dislodged and replaced.
Ayn Rand (1905-1982) worked out her sense of life in a philosophy she called Objectivism. She had a metaphysics, an epistemology, and an ethics, but so does everyone else. People differ in their capacity and willingness to subject their “non-negotiables” to analytical negotiation, as the latter differ in their ability to survive critical scrutiny. (I refer the reader who may think I have a soft spot for Objectivism to my Atheism Analysed: The Implosion of George Smith’s “Case against God.”)
The worldview/sense of life apologist from whom I’ve learned the most was Greg L. Bahnsen (1948-1995); I put some of what I learned from him on display in Philosophy after Christ: Thinking God’s Thoughts after Him. I was therefore delighted to remember when he quoted that Schlitz beer commercial in a lecture and then reading it in one of his articles (later anthologized):
When we identify the presuppositions of the unbeliever, we will see in case after case (indeed, in every case ultimately) that the unbeliever has an unmanaged and irresolvable tension between his operating assumptions. His basic beliefs about reality, or about knowledge, or about ethics do not comport with each other—do not work harmoniously with each other or outright contradict each other. . . .
Imagine that your neighbor expresses an outlook which can be summarized in the words of a well-known beer commercial: “You only go around once in life, so go for all the gusto you can get!” That is, pleasure is the leading value in life, and there is no accountability for our conduct after this life.
On the other hand, imagine that this same neighbor expresses indignation over a well-documented instance of police brutality, or over the oppression and invasion of a weaker nation by some tyrant, or over light sentences handed down to rapists, or over bribes accepted by government officials, or over racial hatred and discrimination, etc. (Take your pick).
These two views—that pleasure is the highest value, but brutality (etc.) is to be condemned—expose a conceptual tension within your neighbor’s thinking. He is not being consistent. After all, if policemen or rapists or tyrants (etc.) get pleasure from what they are doing to others, then they should, on your neighbor’s hypothesis (“go for all the gusto you can get”), pursue those very activities which your neighbor turns around and condemns.
Greg L. Bahnsen, Always Ready: Directions for Defending the Faith,
Robert R. Booth, American Vision, 1996. The book’s complete plaintext is here.
How your neighbor might respond psychologically to the exposure of his conceptual tension, that is, how he feels about being shown that he holds at least two logically incompatible beliefs, is one thing. What I wish to emphasize is that this exposure does not involve directly proving anything to him, making him “cry uncle,” so to speak. It does, however, logically eliminate options, whether their holders admit it or not.
Being only a few years old when Alain died, Bill could not ask the Frenchman, known for his anti-statist individualism (which didn’t stop him from defending the French colonial empire in the “Great War”) and for his counsel to “Live!” in the here-and-now (that is, for being what Bill calls a “worldling”) how he could admire the totalitarian and genocidal Hitler for whose victory Alain hoped.[1]
Life is, indeed, short, as Bill quotes Alain, and therefore one should not waste it. Hitler shortened it for millions, laying waste to them, converting them into corpses, yet he apparently induced less “life-denying sickness” in Alain than those monks who laid out corpses for a week for (in Alain’s words) “the edification of the living.” Straining out the gnats of a mortuary he swallowed the camel of crematoria (Matthew 23:24). To which Alain should we pay attention?
Alain denied things Bill believes true and valued things Bill detested. Bill’s defense of (or apologia for) his worldview’s truth could have begun by showing that Alain was standing in quicksand. Bill could then examine Alain’s response, if he had one (before going under); if he hadn’t, he removed himself from consideration as someone people should listen to.
In my book, I formulated a syllogism (based on an exclusive disjunction) for the worldview approach to eliminating alternatives to the Christian worldview: that it alone makes sense of syllogizing.[2] Not a direct proof that God exists from propositions somehow better known, perhaps, but a rationally sufficient abductive argument that vindicates Christian theism. Unbelievers (like Alain) have the intellectual (and the ethical and the psychological, etc.) problem. They can frame problems only because they poach the worldview they reject. Christians should not give the impression that we despair at the prospect of explaining this to unbelievers, even if they would never give us the satisfaction of crying uncle.
Notes
[1] “As far as I’m concerned, I would like to be rid of anti-Semitism, but I cannot” (Alain’s diary entry for January 28, 1938); “Perhaps we shall see if, once the Jews have been eliminated from all sorts of power, things go better. It may be, but I don’t know” (August 3, 1940); “I hope Germany will prevail, for the de Gaulle style must not be allowed to prevail in this country” (July 23, 1940). Joanny Moulin provides the French original of these quotations in her article, “The Ghosts of Word War II: The Year in France,” Biography, 42:1 (2019), 49. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26755241.
[2] Anthony Flood, “No Mere Assertion: The Transcendental Argument for the Christian Worldview (and, Therefore, for the Existence of God),” Philosophy after Christ: Thinking God’s Thoughts after Him, 2022, chapter 13, 119-128. An ancestor of this chapter is on this site.