Topics Value

Question Why should I care about life at all? I am on track to achieve financial and intellectual success. I will have the opportunity to serve humanity as well. I have a loving family. I am healthy and handsome. But if consciousness dissolves with annihilation; if the earth will ultimately become a cold, dead rock; if all of the science, wisdom, and art eventually cease to have meaning because no one will exist to apprehend them; why should I care about life at all? The only reasons I can think of are momentum, an ineffable sense of obligation to my friends and family, and fear of the undiscovered country. There have to be more and better reasons to care about life.

Accepted:
November 2, 2005

Comments

Usually, the question "Why should I care about X?" is asked against the backdrop of many cares that are taken for granted. Often we convince ourselves to care about something by showing that it's a means to getting or sustaining something we antecedently care about. I'd like to hold (but people disagree: see Question 127) that there are some things we care about immediately, without the need to have that care mediated by anything else we care about. But either way, if one gets into a state in which one cannot see why one ought to care about anything, life included, well then it's hard to see how to find the materials in that care-less world from which to fashion any kind of care.

The theoretical expectation of this difficulty is borne out by examining case histories of the descent into what used to be called "melancholia". For instance, you might appreciate John Stuart Mill's Autobiography, in Chapter V of which he describes his nervous breakdown at the age of 20: he no longer attached value to anything and struggled to find a way back into a world populated by value. I would also strongly recommend Tolstoy's Confessions, in which he chronicles his descent into despair as meaningfulness seeped gradually out of his world, a descent slowed a little by the rhythms of family life, but one which eventually plunged him into a deep pit. Both Mill and Tolstoy recovered (pre-Prozac) and succeeded in repopulating their world with value. They did so in ways that, at least on the surface, appear rather different from one another (though I think there are very interesting commonalities).