- Tolstoy's crisis, reinterpreted
- Next time: a question about the logic of meaningfulness
ANNOUNCEMENTS
- Yes we have class Friday, but it will be a little short
- I received an email from the bookstore saying they mistakenly told someone they had run out of Tolstoy. They actually have more copies!
- Are you having trouble with Qwickly? I fixed a problem on my end. It may help to go into your phone settings and clear the cache for Qwickly. The HELP desk can help you do that.
Big picture
The threat of meaninglessness
- Cottingham: meaning writers come to terms with fragility, contingency
- Tolstoy: threat is death
- Setiya: threat is certain problems at midlife
- Taylor: threat is Sisyphean futility
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Tolstoy's crisis
- The problem: death undoes everything; makes it appear that life is meaningless
- The solution: faith, union with the infinite, parts of life are meaningful
Tolstoy's crisis, a second look: was he having a midlife crisis?
- Age and happiness --
- Graham and Pozuelo, "Is happiness just a matter of waiting for the right age?"
- Graham and Pozuelo, "Happiness, stress and age" (pdf pg. 29 onward)
- Tolstoy was around 50 at the time of his crisis
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Kieran Setiya, Midlife: A Philosophical Guide
- MIT philosophy professor, author of many books and articles, married with children
- having a crisis in his 40s
- Annotated Reading is here
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What is the midlife crisis all about?
1. Schopenhauer on desires/goals
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| All three are bad to some degree |
2. Pursuing goals is strangely self-undermining
What gives purpose to your life is having goals. Yet in pursuing them, you either fail (not good) or in succeeding, bring them to a close. If what you care about is achievement— earning a promotion, having a child, writing a book, saving a life— the completion of your project may be of value, but it means that the project can no longer be your guide. Sure, you have other goals, and you can formulate new ones. The problem is not the risk of running out, the aimless nightmare of Schopenhauer’s boredom. It is that your engagement with value is self- destructive. The way in which you relate to the activities that matter most to you is by trying to complete them and so expel them from your life. Your days are devoted to ending, one by one, the activities that give them meaning. (Setiya, Midlife, p. 133)
3. Telic vs. atelic activities
- Telos = goal, end
- Telic activities: "they aim at terminal states, at which they are finished and exhausted" (p. 133-134)
- walking home, writing a book (can be completed)
- Atelic activities: "they do not aim at a point of termination or exhaustion, a final state in which they have been achieved" (p. 134)
- going for a walk, listening to music, hanging out with friends (can't be completed, though you can just stop)
4. Putting it all together to explain the midlife crisis
If your sources of meaning are overwhelmingly telic then whatever their value ... they are schemes for which success can only mean cessation. It is as if you are striving to eradicate meaning from your life, saved only by the fact that there is too much of it or that you keep on finding more. This is what Schopenhauer got right: if you focus on telic activities, your efforts work against you. Your motivation “springs from lack, from deficiency,” if not from pain: the deficiency that consists in being at a distance from the terminal state at which you aim. Yet in achieving that aim, you end an activity that made your life worthwhile.
It is this engine of self-destruction that powers my midlife crisis and perhaps a part of yours. I have spent four decades acquiring a taste and aptitude for the telic, for achievement and the next big thing, for personal and professional success— only to feel the void within. Fulfillment lies always in the future or the past. That is no way to live. (p. 134-135)
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Tolstoy's crisis -- is it this kind of crisis of the overly telic?
What did you say?
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Setiya's advice for avoiding a midlife crisis
- Everyone has to be telic to some degree--you have to make dinner, do your job, etc--don't stop doing those things!
- But you can take a less telic approach to your life
- If you stick with a telic activity, focus on the process, not just the goal
- Choose atelic counterparts of your telic activities
- You should shift away from telic activities and toward atelic activities
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Discussion
Setiya seems to say that all telic activities pose a risk of post-completion deflation. But is that true? Could Tolstoy have resolved his crisis by just shifting to different telic activities?
