Words&Dirt

“The assumption I am considering, as I put it, is that in cosmic terms human beings have a definite measure of importance.  The most common application of that assumption, naturally enough, has been that they have a high degree of importance; and I have suggested that that itself can take two different forms: the Petrarchan or celebratory form, in which man is splendidly important, and what we may call the Lutheran form, that what is of ultimate significance is the fact that man is wretchedly fallen.  But there is another and less obvious application of the same assumption: that human beings do have a definite measure of importance in the scheme of things, but that it is very low.  On this view, there is a significance of human beings to the cosmos, but it is vanishingly small.  This may not be a very exciting truth about the cosmos, as contrasted with those other outlooks I mentioned, but it is still meant to be a truth about the cosmos; moreover, it is meant to be an exciting, or at least significant, truth about human beings.  I think that this may have been what Bertrand Russell was thinking when, for instance in an essay significantly called A Free Man’s Worship, he went on about the trasitoriness of human beings, the tininess of the earth, the vast and pitiless expanses of the universe and so on, in a style of self-pitying and at the same time self-glorifying rhetoric that made Frank Ramsey remark that he himself was much less impressed than some of his friends were by the size of the universe, perhaps because he weighed 240 pounds.

This outlook can make people feel that human activities are absurd, because we invest them with an importance which they do not really possess.  If someone feels about human activities in this way, there is never much point, it must be said, in telling him that his feelings involve a muddle: the feelings probably come from some place which that comment will not reach.  All the same, they do involve a muddle.  It is a muddle between thinking that our activities fail some test of cosmic significance, and (as contrasted with that) recognizing that there is no such test.  If there is no such thing as the cosmic point of view, if the idea of absolute importance in the scheme of things is an illusion, a relic of a world not yet thoroughly disenchanted, then there is no other point of view except ours in which our activities can have or lack significance.  Perhaps, in a way, that is what Russell wanted to say, but his journey through the pathos of loneliness and insignificance as experienced from a non-existent point of view could only generate the kind of muddle that is called sentimentality.  Nietzsche by contrast got it right when he said that once upon a time there was a star in a corner of the universe, and a planet circling that star, and on it some clever creatures who invented knowledge; and then they died, and the star went out, and it was as though nothing had happened.

Of course, there is in principle a third possibility, between a cosmic point of view and our point of view, a possibility familiar from science fiction: that one day, we might encounter other creatures who would have a point of view on our activities––a point of view which, it is quite vital to add, we could respect.”

––Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline, by Bernard Williams, pg. 137-8