The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations. - book reviews

National Review, Dec 31, 1989 by Keneth Minogue

The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations

WHEN HARVARD philosopher Robert Nozick published Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), it made him famous. In th burgeoning literature of social philosophy, he stood out as the man who put the libertarian case against the welfarism of John Rawls. Many American liberals raged to see the minimal state derived from a few Lockean Premises. One attacked it as "giving spurious intellectual respectability to the reactionary backlash that is already visible . . . in the United States."

Many a man would have rested on his laurels after receiving such moving accolades, but laurels are obviously in short supply at Harvard. Nozick's head was turned, and he abandoned social philosophy for metaphysics. "Isn't it ludicrous," Nozick asked, in a famous sentence in Philosophical Explanations (1981) which showed that brash was already turning into homespun, "for someone just one generation from the Schtetl, a pisher from Brownsville and East Flatbush in Brooklyn, even to touch the topics of the monumental thinkers?" Nozick's moral and epistemological reflections, however, did not have the runaway success of his social philosophy. Undaunted, in his new book, The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations, he has moved on to a new endeavor: the application of philosophy to the perplexities of our time.

Critics used to complain that Anglo-Saxon philosophy was aridly technical, but these days philosophers are found in social institutions all over America, sorting out ethical dilemmas. No charge of ivory-tower irrelevance can be brought against Nozick's 27 Meditations, on subjects such as dying, God, happiness, sexuality, the Holocaust, and wisdom. The layman may well find the thread of continuity easier to grasp than the professional philosopher, who will certainly succumb to the vapors upon arriving at Meditation 17: "The Matrix of Reality." Here will be found no fewer than 64 separate categories of "relevant evaluative dimensions" displayed in a series of boxes designed to replicate the structure of reality. Nozick thinks that most of us (he includes himself) live our lives too much on "automatic pilot." Perhaps. But the terrifyingly intricate instrument panel provided here will send most readers into a tailspin.

Amid these profundities, it is always a relief when the old social philosopher surfaces, as he sometimes does in Nozick's propensity for converting the meaning of life into lines on graph paper. Happiness, for example, is quantified by a curve in which degrees of happiness are plotted on the vertical axis, and time on the horizontal, thus allowing us to recognize that we mostly prefer an upwardsloping happiness curve--or, as we laymen say, it is better when happiness increases as we go through life. The new Nozick is an instinctive quantifier with an ecumenical tendency to try to cover everything. He frequently calls up a bit of Eastern wisdom to fill the gaps philosophy leaves unfilled. At other times he seems to be operating on the formula: quantification mysticism = profundity.

But the main contemporary interest in The Examined Life is likely to focus on Nozick's recantation of Anarchy, State, and Utopia. The relevant words are:

The libertarian position I once propounded now seems to me seriously inadequate, in part because it did not fully knit the humane considerations and joint cooperative activities it left room for more closely into its fabric. It neglected the symbolic importance of an official political concern with issues or problems as a way of marking their importance or urgency, and hence of expressing, intensifying, channeling, encouraging, and validating our private actions and concerns toward them.

Through the murk of this prose emerges the fact that the Nozick who once cut against the grain of conventional American intellectual opinion has now been swallowed up by it. He believes that the essence of the state is "to jointly and symbolically express" solemn ties of "concern and solidarity" for those of our fellow citizens who are in need. (Nozick is a wild man with an infinitive.) Welfare programs express solidarity, and anyone who wants to opt out of them ought to be ashamed of himself.

This is a muddle. It must be said at once that the modern state can only be understood if we begin by discarding the sentimental moralizing that has dominated much public discussion in the Eighties. The state is essentialy an association of independent and resouceful individuals living under law, and, from a political point of view, the poor and the needy are nothing less than a threat to our freedom. They are, for example, the materials of the demagogue, who tries to gain power by promising to use the coercive power of the state to redistribute benefits.

None of this is to deny that we have moral and perhaps political duties toward the poor. How we fulfill those duties is a matter for public judgment and will no doubt vary from time to time. Still, Nozick would have been wiser had he considered the work of Charles Murray on the complex problems raised by incorporating the poor within a modern society. But the essential point is that to take one's bearings on the nature of the state from the condition of the poor is to start off on the wrong foot. Citizens are categorically different from pensioners.