Jeff Noonan

The paper reconsiders the relationship between nihilism, the absence of transcendent foundations of ethical and political values, and the problem of the meaning or meaninglessness of life. What I will call life-valuable nihilism rejects divine, transcendent, and eschatological sources of value but not the existence of aesthetic, ethical, and political values that human beings discover and create. There were no values at the beginning of space-time and there will be no values after the end of space-time, but people have nonetheless found reasons for living within the limits that physical and human nature impose. Whereas earlier attempts to vindicate the value of life despite its cosmic purposelessness stressed this human existential freedom, I want to concentrate on the other side of existential freedom: existential responsibility to care for and improve the conditions of life expressed as political struggle against the social causes of avoidable damage to actually existing human beings. The more those causes are addressed, the more life-time can be spent in receptive openness to the beauty of the world, creative activities which contribute in valuable and valued ways to the common wealth upon which our lives depend, and mutualistic relationships with other people.

Academic freedom seems to be under assault from all political angles. Opposed sides invoke academic freedom when it serves their purposes but ignore it when doing so serves the purposes of attacking their political enemies. Most at risk in the midst of these on-going battles is the future of the university as a space for free inquiry, debate, criticism, and the extension of human knowledge in all fields of intellectual inquiry. As a step towards safeguarding the future of the university as a space for open inquiry, the meaning and value of academic freedom needs to be clarified. While it is often (and understandably) identified with the constitutional right to free speech, it is in fact different in significant respects. Academic freedom is both a broad principle of free inquiry and argument upon which the university as an intellectual institution rests and a narrow collective agreement right. In both dimensions it is subject to limitations to which the right to free speech is not subject (curricular decisions, for example, must pass the test of relevance to the subject matter, while there are no constraints on introducing extraneous material into public political debates). Since all academics’ professional lives depend upon the institutional commitment to academic freedom, those who would undermine it in favour of their political priorities contradict themselves and raise questions about their fitness for the vocation of teacher-researcher.

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In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1987, the Russian-born American poet Joseph Brodsky argued that aesthetics is the mother of ethics. However, there is an ambiguity in his use of the term aesthetics. In the first part of this article, I distinguish between Brodsky’s narrow use of aesthetics, which refers to problems of beauty, and the broader sense, which refers to the cognitive function of sensibility and feeling. I then suggest that good sense can be made of the claim about the origins of ethics only if we employ the broader sense of aesthetics. The second part draws on examples from Brodsky and the American poet Jorie Graham to illustrate the ways in which the feelings generated by human sensuous receptivity transform the world from a meaningless physical system into meaningful sets of life-valuable relationships. The third part sharpens this conclusion by considering the conditions under which the world can appear to be meaningless. In the final section I link Brodsky’s poetic responsiveness to the world to John McMurtry’s philosophical analysis of “the felt side of being.” Poetic evocation and philosophical argument are two approaches to the same problem which, when brought together, provide a comprehensive explanation of why aesthetics is the mother of ethics.

The article argues that historical materialism is not only a theory of historical change but more generally a mediation between the natural foundations of human life and its meaningful symbolic expressions. The article begins with an interpretation of the general philosophical significance of the basic premises of historical materialism as they are sketched in the German Ideology. I argue that these premises point us in two different directions: down, towards a scientific understanding of the natural world, and up, towards interpretations of meaningful human expressions. Reductionist scientific models are appropriate for the understanding of natural forces, but these reveal their own limitations when applied to social life. Social life cannot be understood outside its symbolic expressions, but these are not free floating ideal abstractions, but remain connected to fundamental human purposes and must be understood as such.

At different times Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse argued that immortality is a condition of overcoming misery and achieving complete human freedom. Their arguments were made before “practical immortality” had become a concrete scientific project. The difference between what was then and what is now scientifically possible alters the ethical and political value of the idea of immortality. Had the first generation of critical theorists occupied the present historical moment, they would have realized that science harnessed to the demand for limitless life would not solve the kind of ethical and existential problems they hoped it would. I argue that the scientific struggle against human finitude is driven by the same egocentric concern for money and self-maximization that early critical theory diagnosed as the main psychological pathology caused by capitalism. Finitude, I conclude, is the price human beings must pay if they are to live free and meaningful lives