But Was Any of It Worthwhile?

The notebook has been put away, but a reader may still have a question. You have told me how those years can remain mine, even when I was mistaken about what I wanted. You have told me why nobody else can take them over. But were they worth spending that way?

That is not a misunderstanding. It is a large part of what people ordinarily mean when they ask whether a life has meaning. The preceding essays have answered a narrower question. Someone who spent years counting blades of grass and someone who spent years helping other people may both have genuinely chosen what they did, reconsidered it, and carried it as their own. That does not make the two projects equally worthwhile. This account has not answered how to compare them.

Aristotle would give us more to ask about than whether the years felt satisfying. His account of happiness concerns activity in accordance with virtue, over a complete life. What a person did, how he did it, what kind of character the doing expressed: these belong to the question. His discussion of whether we must wait for a life to end before judging it is a discussion with qualifications, not a simple rule that the last day reveals the score.

There is a useful meeting here. Neither a passing feeling nor a single achievement tells us everything about a life. But Aristotle is asking about living well. Saying that an ending does not make a person’s account of himself final is not an answer to that question. Nor does his phrase a complete life mean a self-description that nobody may question.

Susan Wolf and Thaddeus Metz bring the reader’s objection closer still. For Wolf, meaning involves being drawn to something that is also objectively worth engaging in, and actually engaging with it. Metz gives a central role to the positive exercise of our rational capacities in relation to fundamental conditions of human existence. Neither lets my enthusiasm alone settle whether what I do matters.

They can therefore ask a hard question of these essays: if your account fits wholehearted devotion to a worthless project, how much of the question of meaning have you kept? The answer cannot be that their question was a mistake. What has been kept is the difference between a choice that was really mine and one I merely took to be mine, and the ways that difference continues to matter years later. What has been set aside is the evaluation of what I chose.

A narrower task is not a better performance of the larger one. Nor would it be fair to accuse Wolf of promising an infallible test of objective value; she does not. There can be a truth about what is worthwhile without anyone possessing a procedure that settles every life from outside. Those are different claims.

Could I At Least Tell the Story Straight?

Suppose the reader accepts that limit. Another question follows. If I cannot give the years a score, can I at least put them into a story that makes sense?

We do this continually. I left because I was frightened. I thought I was leaving because I was brave. I did not know, then, what I was beginning. A new telling can alter what we notice and what we dare to do next. Calling it a description need not make it a harmless decoration added after the living is over.

This is where the narrative tradition presses hardest. MacIntyre writes of a life as the narrative unity of a quest. Taylor places our understanding of ourselves in a moral space, among distinctions about what is worthy, with narrative helping us understand our movement through time. Ricoeur distinguishes sameness from selfhood — idem from ipse — and asks how narrative identity can mediate between them. Remaining recognisably the same and being the self who answers for a promise are not simply one question.

These writers are not merely recommending an attractive memoir. They give narrative a part in how we become intelligible to ourselves as people who act. Filing their work under description would say where the present account puts it. It would not answer their claim.

What these essays can say is smaller. A story about my life can be coherent and still open to correction. It can help me choose without having chosen on my behalf. And a later chapter cannot, just by giving the plot a satisfying shape, make an earlier wrong harmless. The person I hurt is not obliged to accept a useful episode in my development as the whole truth about what happened to him.

There is no need to give up telling. What is refused is the point at which a telling says: this is who I am, and from now on no question is allowed. A good account of oneself need not claim that privilege.

Who Is There to Answer To?

But perhaps being able to question myself again is not enough. Who is doing the questioning? What keeps the whole thing from becoming one voice endlessly consulting itself?

Kierkegaard makes this question harder than a search for a hidden personality. At the opening of The Sickness unto Death, the self is a relation that relates to itself. It has not established itself; in relating rightly to itself, it rests in the power that established it. The question is not simply whether I can produce an accurate inventory of my past.

The resemblance to the preceding essays is real but limited: being oneself involves a relation, not just possessing a collection of traits. Yet Kierkegaard’s account leads to a religious grounding that these essays do not supply. Leaving out that grounding is not showing it to be unnecessary for his question. It means that the two accounts have not undertaken the same task.

And then another person looks back at me. Not a character in my account of myself, but someone whose life was already his before I began thinking about him. Levinas gives the encounter with the other a force that goes beyond adding one more freely chosen concern to my plans. The other calls my freedom into question; his ethical claim does not wait politely for my approval.

This is a serious challenge to a theory that has spent so much time asking what I have made my own. It is not answered by saying that the other person really exists. His existence and the force of his claim on me are different matters.

The sixth essay asked how another person’s good can become an active concern in my life, and why my support cannot make his becoming himself my possession. It did not establish the full moral force of what he asks of me. Not having taken that claim to heart does not make him unreal; nor does it, on its own, settle whether I have failed an obligation. That further question needs moral reasons. It cannot be disposed of by a definition of meaning.

Would Death Give Us the Missing Answer?

Perhaps the pressure of an ending will tell us how to live. It is a familiar hope: once I truly understand that I will die, everything else will fall into its proper place.

Heidegger’s being-toward-death is not a calendar exercise. Death is a possibility no one can take over for me, and anticipating it means confronting it as a possibility, not wishing for it to happen. His question concerns our way of existing, not just the event that other people will one day record.

These essays also treat finitude as more than an inconvenience waiting at the far end of life. But they have not offered Heidegger’s account of authentic existence. Saying that a deadline does not command me to live urgently limits what I may infer from this theory. It does not refute his analysis. A philosophical account of mortality is not fairly answered by treating it as a piece of productivity advice.

Kant takes a different route. In the Critique of Practical Reason, the immortality of the soul is a postulate of practical reason, not something theoretical reason has proved. The demand that the will be fully adequate to the moral law requires, for a finite rational being, an endless progress; Kant therefore postulates the continued existence of the same person. This belongs to his account of the highest good.

The preceding essays do not undertake to secure the conditions of the highest good. They therefore do not need that postulate to finish their particular task. But carrying less does not make an account more secure than one carrying more. The absence of theoretical proof is no surprise that can be used to defeat a postulate introduced precisely with that status.

A reader may believe in continuation and live differently because of it. Here that can be acknowledged as a way of facing the limit, without being treated as proof of what lies beyond it. Another reader may decline the belief. The present account neither requires nor forbids it, and neither choice settles the belief’s truth or the consequences of acting on it.

Wittgenstein asks a question that remains even if continuation is granted. Near the end of the Tractatus, alongside the claim that the sense of the world lies outside it and the observation that death is not an experience within life, he asks whether an endless life would solve life’s riddle. Would it not remain a riddle?

That question prevents a convenient escape. More time does not, merely by being more, tell me what the time is for. Even if the uncertainty left open in the seventh essay were resolved, this other question would not automatically be answered. Saying we have not established this is an honest stopping point. It is not the solution to every problem that has brought us there.

Then What About What I Leave Behind?

A teacher might be willing to give up any claim to personal immortality and still ask: if the student’s future is wholly his own, what became of all the years I gave him?

An older conversation offers a useful distinction. In the Zuo Zhuan, Mushu speaks of establishing virtue, achievement and words, in that order, as three ways of becoming imperishable. The explanation is that these do not fall out of use with the passing years. It does not require the person who first established them to remain alive in the first person.

The seventh essay does not deny such endurance. It denies the inference from what I gave continues to work to I therefore continue my own first-person life through its recipients. Those are not the same assertion. There is also a difference of purpose: the passage in the Zuo Zhuan ranks virtue, achievement and words. These essays have offered no competing ranking.

What, then, did the teacher have? The years in which he actually taught, chose, reconsidered, cared. They were his while he lived them; the student’s independence does not take them away. His contribution may continue to deserve recognition. But he does not need to own a portion of the student’s self in order for his own work to have been real.

Nor must someone whose work leaves no such trace borrow an enduring work to justify having lived. An account concerned with how a person carries his own history cannot quietly change its admission rule at the end and demand that someone else keep it going.

The Question Left on the Table

These conversations do not assemble a jury to pronounce on the man with the notebook. They expose how much can be packed into his question. Was it worthwhile? Can I understand what happened? What do I owe another person? Does an ending explain anything? Each deserves more than being told that a different question has been answered.

The thread these essays have followed is modest enough to hold in one hand: those things happened in my life, some were really mine and some I mistook for mine, and from here I can still have something to do with them. Other people may help me see them. Other people may receive something from what I do. Neither makes my life theirs, or theirs mine.

The notebook need not end with a verdict. It can end with a margin still wide enough to write in.