or, On How the Good Life is a Game, Part 1
There is only one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
I recently learned something interesting: I have reached the age at which a midlife crisis is supposed to begin.
When a middle-aged man or woman takes up smoking—or gives it up—we tend to say they are having a midlife crisis. But this expression that gets thrown around quite liberally actually has a pedigree. The term “mid-life crisis” first appeared in “Death and the Mid-life Crisis,” a 1965 paper by the Canadian psychoanalyst Elliott Jaques. Jaques used it to describe a crisis brought on by the recognition of a paradox: we are entering the prime of life, the stage of achievement, yet that prime and those achievements have a time limit, and beyond them lies death. He places its onset at around thirty-five.1 I turn thirty-six in a few weeks, so by Jaques’s reckoning, I am about due. Honestly, though, what unsettles me most is not the prospect of a crisis. It is the thought that someone who still lives as if he has some growing up to do could already count as “middle-aged.”
The psychological crisis Jaques named has since become a familiar topic in psychology, cognitive science, and self-help. In his 2014 paper “The Midlife Crisis,” MIT philosopher Kieran Setiya approaches it as a philosophical problem.2 His subject, however, differs somewhat from Jaques’s. For Jaques, the midlife crisis is a psychological crisis prompted by our first real apprehension of death’s inevitability. Setiya grants that an awareness of death often serves as the trigger, but he does not think it constitutes the heart of the crisis. What concerns him is not the fear of death itself but a sense of futility: “an apparent absence of meaning or significance in life.”
This sense of futility is different from the kind of extreme nihilism Leo Tolstoy describes in A Confession, in which a person loses every reason to act and sinks into utter paralysis.3 In fact, it is almost the reverse. People do not suddenly lose all their reasons for acting when a midlife crisis strikes. They still have families they love and need to care for, and piles of books they want to read. Finishing a demanding project at work still brings satisfaction. Yet the thought of the morning after leaves them feeling strangely hollow. Taken individually, these things clearly matter. But a life consisting of one such thing after another somehow feels deficient and meaningless. Looking after the family more attentively, reading more books, taking on bigger projects: none of it dispels the emptiness. Searching for its source, some people light their first cigarette, while others put it out. Or they pick up something like Reading Schopenhauer at Forty. In most cases, though, trying something else—whether cigarettes or Schopenhauer—does not resolve a midlife crisis. The problem is not what you do. It is the fact that life seems to consist of nothing more than just one thing after another. Setiya’s description brings to mind the famous lament of Qoheleth, the author of Ecclesiastes:4
A feeling… that life is empty, or hollow, or futile—just one thing after another, and to what end? What does it all add up to if we eventually come to nothing, as I assume we do?
Setiya, 2014.
Setiya considers John Stuart Mill’s experience a paradigm case of the midlife crisis. As is well known, Mill received an extraordinary education from a very early age under the direction of his father, himself a leading intellectual of the day. He began learning ancient Greek at three, and by eight he was studying Latin, Euclidean geometry, and algebra, and reading Plato. The price of this education was steep: along with his vast knowledge and intellectual brilliance came a devastating mental crisis. It was the cost of being immersed in purely intellectual pursuits from such a young age, with his emotional life and sensibility kept under relentless restraint. After months of suffering, he gradually found his way out of depression through the work of Romantic poets, particularly William Wordsworth. Mill describes this period at length in his autobiography, but one passage is especially revealing. He asks himself: suppose everything I want and hope for were to come true. Would that finally free me from this crisis? His “irrepressible self-consciousness” gives an unequivocal answer: “No!”5
I was in a dull state of nerves, such as everybody is occasionally liable to; unsusceptible to enjoyment or pleasurable excitement; one of those moods when what is pleasure at other times, becomes insipid or indifferent. […] In this frame of mind it occurred to me to put the question directly to myself: “Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?” And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, “No!”
Mill, 1873, quoted in Setiya, 2014.
Mill’s experience shows why throwing ourselves more deeply into our pursuits and accumulating further achievements cannot, by themselves, resolve a midlife crisis.
His case reveals something else, too: the crisis Setiya describes is not a privilege reserved for the middle-aged. Mill was just twenty when he fell into his devastating depression. His was a coming-of-age crisis, rather than a midlife one. As Setiya acknowledges, some people experience this feeling in their twenties, as Mill did; for others, it arrives only toward the end of middle age. My own experience bears this out. I read Camus’s The Stranger during my military service at twenty-two and promptly went through a belated puberty. (Season two arrived at twenty-eight, while I was in law school.) Perhaps, then, a midlife crisis is not an unwelcome visitor that shows up at a particular stage of life. It may be the moment we notice something that has been lurking all along in the way we live. Setiya calls this something a “normative defect”: a respect in which our lives fall short of how they ought to be. Middle age is simply when the symptoms often become visible, rather than when the underlying problem begins.
What, then, is this normative defect, and how can we remedy it? These are the questions Setiya attempts to answer in “The Midlife Crisis.”
The Aristotelian View
Setiya considers several hypotheses in search of a precise diagnosis. Let us look at one he examines particularly closely. It begins with a famous argument from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.6 Aristotle distinguishes three kinds of ends: those we desire only for the sake of something else; those we desire both for their own sake and for the sake of something else; and those we desire only for their own sake.
We desire wealth, for example, not because wealth is good in itself, but because it allows us to buy other things. If money ceased to be accepted, no one would try to acquire more of it. Wealth therefore belongs in Aristotle’s first category: things desired only for the sake of something else. Honor and virtue, by contrast, belong in the second. They are good in themselves, but also good for the sake of something further. If there is a highest good, however—something better and more valuable than anything else—it must belong in the third category. The highest good cannot be subordinate to some further good; it must be final, desirable solely for its own sake. Aristotle identifies contemplative activity as this highest good.
Contemplative activity alone seems to be loved for its own sake. Nothing results from it beyond the contemplation itself, whereas from practical activities we seek, to a greater or lesser extent, something beyond the action.
Aristotle, 2011, p. 371, 1177b1–4.
Whether contemplation really is the highest good available to human beings is not important for our purposes. What matters is that Setiya recasts Aristotle’s distinction in terms of derivative and underived value.7 Something has derivative value when its value comes from the value of something else, even though it need not be a mere means. This gives Setiya a hypothesis to examine: “the origin of the midlife crisis is an estrangement from underived value, an alienation from the source of everything good in human life” (Setiya, 2014, p. 8). In other words, a midlife crisis arises because activities with underived value are missing from our lives.
Setiya rejects this hypothesis, offering two main objections. First, would the best life really consist exclusively of things with underived value? It is not obvious that underived value is necessarily superior to derivative value. One argument for its superiority is that derivative value is, in a certain sense, dependent on circumstances. The value of moral virtues such as justice and courage, for instance, depends on the existence of injustice, suffering, and deprivation. Without injustice, there would be no wrongs to put right. On Setiya’s reading, this is why Aristotle treats the value of virtue as derivative.
But not everything with derivative value shares this feature. Consider composing music. Its value depends on the value of listening to or performing music, and is derivative in that sense. Yet composing is not valuable merely as a remedy for what is lacking in the world, in the way moral virtue is on this account. Nor is it easy to accept that the best life—supposedly a life consisting only of things with underived value—would exclude composing music simply because its value is derivative.
Setiya’s second objection is more decisive. Even a life devoted entirely to underived value seems vulnerable to a midlife crisis. Imagine a mathematician who has made solving difficult mathematical problems her life’s work. She believes that mathematical research has underived value: its value depends on nothing else. She spends years proving a theorem, moves on to another difficult problem, and then to yet another mathematical truth…
Wait. Does this picture look familiar? Her life is structurally similar to the one we encountered at the beginning: looking after the family, reading the books piled up at home, finishing demanding projects, with everything simply following everything else. It is that same pattern of “one thing after another.” Setiya goes further and asks us to imagine that she solves every mathematical problem there is. “For then what would she do?” he asks. The Aristotelian hypothesis overlooks something crucial: the midlife crisis is bound up with time, and more particularly with our finitude.
No matter how important her discoveries, they generate a sense of repetition and exhaustion. Each one is completed, left behind, replaced by another project, and the whole is a mere accumulation. Again, the crisis has a temporal aspect that death makes vivid. This dimension is lost in the Aristotelian view.
Setiya, 2014, p. 10.
Schopenhauer’s Pendulum
So far, we have established two things. First, the midlife crisis does not turn on whether the activities we pursue have derivative or underived value. Second, it is closely connected with time and finitude. A natural question follows: might our finitude itself be the source of the crisis? This, you may recall, is how Jaques understands it. If we could live forever, could we overcome the midlife crisis?
Whether an eternal life would be desirable is an important philosophical question. You might think the answer is obvious: surely living forever would be a good thing. Yet many philosophers disagree. According to one influential argument, eternal life is not merely undesirable. A person who lived forever could not maintain a coherent identity, so in a certain sense, living forever as the same person may not even be possible.8 Setiya says he is not persuaded by such objections to eternal life in principle. But he is clear that immortality would do nothing to resolve the midlife crisis.
To explain why, he begins with the image of a pendulum from Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation. For Schopenhauer, life swings endlessly between pain and boredom.
The basis of all willing […] is need, lack, and hence pain, and by its very nature and origin [the animal] is therefore destined to pain. If, on the other hand, it lacks objects of willing, because it is at once deprived of them again by too easy a satisfaction, a fearful emptiness and boredom comes over it; in other words, its being and its existence become an intolerable burden for it. Hence it swings like a pendulum to and fro between pain and boredom, and these two are in fact its ultimate constituents.
Schopenhauer, 1844, vol. 1, p. 312, quoted in Setiya, 2014, p. 11.
We desire many things in the course of our lives: money, for instance, or love. Some desires are fulfilled; others are frustrated. But the moment a desire is successfully fulfilled and we obtain its object, we lose one of the reasons that kept us going. In comes that “fearful emptiness and boredom.” As long as a desire remains unfulfilled, on the other hand, we are in a state of lack, and that lack is pain. As desiring beings, we seem caught in a predicament from which there is no escape: whether our desires are fulfilled or not, we suffer.
As Setiya points out, this picture is excessively bleak. An unfulfilled desire does not always involve suffering. Consider our mathematician again. She wants to solve a difficult problem, but doing so may take years. It hardly follows that she must spend those years in pain. Rather than suffering because the problem remains unsolved, might she not quietly hope to solve it while enjoying the process of working toward a solution, one step at a time?
Nevertheless, Setiya thinks Schopenhauer’s pendulum contains an important clue. He focuses on the side of the pendulum where desire has been fulfilled: the condition Schopenhauer associates with “fearful emptiness and boredom.” But boredom is not Setiya’s concern. We always have other goals, and we can devise new ones to occupy us. The problem is that our very way of engaging with what is valuable is self-destructive. The moment we successfully achieve what we desired, the very object that gave us a reason to live and kept us moving loses its power to do so.
Think of it this way. What gives purpose to your life is having goals, aims, objects of will. Yet in pursuing them, you either fail — which is not good — or in succeeding, extinguish their power to guide your activities. If what you care about is achieving X — making this discovery, solving this problem, writing this paper, ending this war — the completion of your project may constitute something of value, but it means that the project can no longer give purpose to your life. Sure, you have other ends, and you can formulate new ones. The problem is not the risk of running out, of reaching the aimless state of Schopenhauer’s boredom. It is that your engagement with value is self-destructive.
Setiya, 2014, p. 12.
Think of a novelist who has spent years working on the book of a lifetime. Finishing it is a moment of great joy and significance. But it is also the moment when the project that gave the novelist a reason to live and a direction to follow—the project of completing that novel—ceases to exist. We spend our days, then, destroying one by one the activities that give our lives meaning. To borrow Setiya’s analogy, pursuing goals is like making friends for the sake of saying goodbye.
Understood this way, the crisis makes it clear why living forever would offer no solution. Given eternal life, the novelist could write another novel. And another, and another. But an infinite extension of time would not change the basic way the novelist relates to those novels. Each one departs upon completion, and the next must begin. Eternal life would amount to an endless succession of goodbyes. The fundamental structure of life would remain unchanged; the pattern of “one thing after another” would simply continue forever. Death triggers the midlife crisis not because it causes the underlying problem, but because it makes this self-destructive way of living starkly apparent.
A project gives us a reason to live; achieving it destroys that very project. This structural paradox is the central diagnosis at which Setiya arrives after his long argument.
Never-ending Activities
How, then, can we escape the midlife crisis? Setiya turns once more to Aristotle, this time to the Metaphysics rather than the Nicomachean Ethics. Here Aristotle distinguishes between two kinds of action, or praxis: kinesis and energeia. The crucial difference is whether an activity can be distinguished from its completion. An activity of the first kind takes us toward a state of completion that we reach only after performing it. In an activity of the second kind, completion belongs to the activity at every moment. The doing and its fulfilment are inseparable.
Consider walking. I enjoy walking along Yangjaecheon, a stream in Seoul, but I do not always walk for the same reason. Sometimes I follow the stream to get to a bar I like. This activity—let us call it getting somewhere on foot—is completed when I reach the bar. While I am still walking, I have not yet arrived, so the activity remains incomplete. In Aristotle’s terms, it is an instance of kinesis.
At other times, though, I wander without a destination, as I do on an evening stroll. Here the point is not to get from point A to point B. The point is simply to walk. There is no further state of completion that I reach as a result of the activity. When I return home, I do not think, “At last, I have completed my stroll.” Every moment, from the first to the last, has already been a stroll. This makes it an instance of energeia.
Setiya calls activities of the first kind telic and those of the second atelic. He argues that the way to overcome the midlife crisis is to reduce the prominence of telic activities in our lives and invest more deeply in atelic ones. Think back to the lives we have examined: the typical lives vulnerable to this crisis. They consist of a succession of telic activities. We work hard on one project, but eventually complete it. We move on to the next, which will also eventually conclude, destroying itself in the process. One thing follows another until, sooner or later, we end up with cigarettes or Reading Schopenhauer at Forty. But the cigarette will burn out, and Reading Schopenhauer at Forty ends on page 232. The problem lies in the succession of telic activities, and our response has been to pile more telic activities on top.
It is what we are doing when the midlife crisis comes. This is my diagnosis. The crisis is explained by, and follows from, an excessive investment in telic activities, not as means but ends. Those who are subject to the crisis may value activities that are atelic — the harmless pleasures of walking or talking to friends – where these are the objects of final desire. But the activities that matter most to them, the ones that give meaning to their lives, are ones that aim at terminal states. To be oriented in this way is a normative defect, and the experience of crisis is a distressing though often inarticulate awareness of this defect in one’s life.
Setiya, 2014, pp. 13–14.
Earlier, I said that the midlife crisis is closely connected with time and finitude, while also insisting that immortality would not solve it. We can now explain why. The finitude at the root of the crisis belongs to the activities we pursue, rather than to our lives. The finitude of life merely brings it into view. As Setiya explains, telic activities aim by their nature at a terminal state: a point of completion at which they end. In this sense, they are finite.
Atelic activities, by contrast, cannot by their nature be completed. To put it somewhat poetically, they never end. They are not directed toward reaching some particular point or bringing about some particular state of affairs. If we make finishing a philosophy book our goal and invest our concern in that goal, the project will destroy itself the moment we finish the book. But if we care about reading philosophy itself, things look quite different. Closing the last page does not complete the activity of reading philosophy. As Setiya puts it, when we are going for a walk or studying philosophy, we are not on our way to our destination: “You are already there.”
Ultimately, then, the issue is neither what kind of value we pursue, nor what kind of activity we undertake, nor the fact that our lives are finite. It is the way we relate to the activities we pursue. Setiya recommends the following:
We should picture here a shift in the order of reasons assumed in Schopenhauer’s argument. Instead of spending time with friends in order to complete a shared project — building a matchstick model of Forbes Field — one pursues a common project in order to spend time with friends. Instead of studying Aristotle in order to write an essay, which is a telic end, one writes an essay in order to study Aristotle.
Setiya, 2014, p. 15.
The Paradox of Atelic Activities
Setiya’s paper, however, does not end happily ever after. Near its conclusion, he considers one remaining problem. To do philosophy, we still have to read philosophy books, and a book ends when we close its last page. Even if we write an essay in order to study Aristotle, we still have to write the essay, and an essay ends with its final full stop. Atelic activities, in other words, are possible only through some form of telic activity.
But there is a catch. Even though they are just means, we still engage in telic activities. We cannot simply spend time with friends, we have to spend it in some endeavour. We cannot simply do philosophy: we have to read a book, work through a problem, write a paper. There is an ineluctable strain of self-destruction not in atelic ends but in our way of relating to them, even now. Perhaps, if we were gods, we could contemplate the world through basic action, just like that. But we are not.
Setiya, 2014, p. 16.
He closes by returning to Schopenhauer’s bleak image:
Schopenhauer’s theory is too bleak, but it contains a grain of truth, a truth present in the observation that walking, going for a walk, that humdrum instance of an atelic end, is always scarred by imperfection, marred by telic means, one foot placed in front of the other, an obstacle over-stepped, that walking is at best, for us, “a constantly prevented falling”.
Schopenhauer, 1844/1966, vol. 1, p. 311; quoted in Setiya, 2014, pp. 16–17.
In the end, rather disappointingly, Setiya’s prescription offers only half an answer. We can reverse the order of reasons and make telic activities serve atelic ones, but we cannot dispense with those means altogether. Telic activity remains a flaw we have no choice but to carry: a “regrettable” defect that would have no place in an ideal life. A step, on this view, is not really an act of walking at all, but merely a moment in which we have fortunately managed not to fall.
But is that right? Are telic activities merely instruments of atelic ones—things we would be better off without, regrettably retained only because we cannot avoid them? Setiya ends his paper without resolving this tension. I think he has missed something crucial here. And what I really want to discuss begins precisely where he leaves off.
That discussion begins with an ancient Greek fable older than the writings of Plato: the story of the grasshopper, traditionally attributed to Aesop. Through it, we will explore why telic activities are more than regrettable by-products, and move toward a rather surprising conclusion: that the most ideal form of life human beings can imagine is a life of playing games.
Notes
- Jaques, E. (1965). Death and the mid-life crisis. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 46, 502–514. Quoted in Setiya, K. (2014). The midlife crisis. Philosophers’ Imprint, 14(31), 1–18. ↩︎
- Setiya, K. (2014). The midlife crisis. Philosophers’ Imprint, 14(31), 1–18. ↩︎
- “My life had come to a standstill. I could breathe, eat, drink, and sleep, since as long as I was alive I could not help doing these things. But there was no life in me, because there was nothing I felt I had to accomplish on this earth, and therefore nothing I truly wanted to accomplish.” Leo Tolstoy, A Confession, Korean translation by Park Moon-jae, Hyundai Jisung. Translated here from the Korean. ↩︎
- “Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher; all is vanity.” Ecclesiastes 12:8. ↩︎
- Mill, J. S. (1873). Autobiography. Quoted in Setiya, K. (2014). The midlife crisis. Philosophers’ Imprint, 14(31), 1–18. ↩︎
- Aristotle. (2011). Nicomachean ethics (Sang-Jin Kang, Jae-Hong Kim, & Chang-Woo Lee, Trans.). Gil. Korean edition; the passage above is translated from the Korean. ↩︎
- Setiya first considers reading Aristotle’s distinction in terms of instrumental value: things that are purely instrumental; things that are both means and ends; and things that are non-instrumental. But on this reading, it is unclear why the third category should be better than the second—why being useless should make something better. Setiya therefore reinterprets Aristotle’s “for the sake of something else” as meaning that its value is explained by the value of something else. A wedding ring is not a means to a marriage, but its value derives from that relationship. Something can therefore have value because of something else without being a means to it. I have omitted the details of this argument, which are not essential to our discussion. ↩︎
- Williams, B. (1973). The Makropulos case: Reflections on the tedium of immortality. ↩︎
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