Skip to main content

Living for Today

Image result for live for today

A brief comment, if I may, on bromides like that expressed in the cursive writing here. Are they worthless? Are they deep? A bit of both, perhaps?

Human beings (and other self-aware beings as well) undergo a range of experiences, and the having of certain of these experiences is good. There is no single type of good experience: the best we can do is settle for a short list. My list, which I have discussed here before, runs as follows: it is good that we enjoy social relationships with those near and dear to ourselves; it is good that we enjoy the sublimity of nature; it is good that we enjoy both the creation and the contemplation of works of art.

Everything else that we may consider good is instrumental: that is, in support of the creation and preservation of those good experiences. For example, a prosperous economy is good because it enables the leisure that itself assists in the enjoyment of those intrinsic goods.

Two principles for action present themselves: act so as to enjoy the intrinsic goods yourself. Also, act so as to support their enjoyment later, by yourself and others. This means that rational moralists will understand the appeal of the frequent injunction "live for today," or "live as if this were you last day on earth."  That is, to the extent such injunctions focus us on the intrinsic goods, those here-and-now sorts of enjoyment listed above, they are valuable. BUT....

It probably isn't your last day. It certainly isn't everybody's last day. The instrumental work has to go on. So live for yourself, but not solely. Live for today, but not solely.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
9 comments
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
17 comments
Read more

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...
4 comments
Read more