It might seem rather a rum deal to have but one short life to lead. It is a life, moreover, spent strangely preoccupied with an uncertain future to the neglect of a familiar past, in which core aspects of emotional experience appear to stand in thrall to time rather than reason, and wherein, as we age, we progressively lose our significant interpersonal attachments. These ordinary features of the human condition, all of which have to do with time, are curious, but also vexatious, insofar as they seem to threaten our capacity to make of this single life a meaningful one.
In a recent book, One Life to Lead, Samuel Scheffler investigates these temporal challenges and finds cause for gratitude. As strange and distressing as the diachronic difficulties of reality are, they enable distinctive sorts of valuable attachments, such as friendships. These attachments, in turn, condition our enjoyment of a good life. The book is divided into topical chapters that address future bias (Chapter 2), time and the emotions (Chapter 3), temporal dissonance (Chapter 4), aging and loss (Chapter 5), the individual’s situation in history (Chapter 6), and the normative significance of interpersonal relationships (Chapter 7).
In developing his ‘attachment-sensitive’ account of our being in time, Scheffler also has a foil: neutralist detachment. This is shorthand for a camp of attitudes – advocated by contemporary philosophers, but also ancient spiritual traditions, and YouTube Stoics – that result in norms of personal and temporal neutrality. Norms, for example, of eschewing partiality in ethical matters, or of assigning no particular significance to when in time some benefit or burden accrues to a person. Scheffler wagers that these norms will lose their appeal once we think seriously about the interrelation of time and person, and about the value of allowing certain existing asymmetries of temporal and personal concern to persist. Take, for example, his treatment of future bias (Chapter 2).
We dread future pain. But the day a pain has passed, our concern with it tends to plummet. Not only is this the case, but, given a choice made famous by Derek Parfit (Reasons and Persons, 1984) – a choice between undergoing a painful surgery followed by amnesia in an hour, or having undergone this (now forgotten) process yesterday – we reliably and strongly prefer yesterday. We would even prefer to have experienced a worse pain yesterday, than a lesser pain in the future. This future bias seems to threaten our claim to rationality. Why should it matter where a pain happens in the course of my life? What matters is that pain happened, and it happened to me! Future bias might not be a harmless chauvinism either: it might threaten our prospects of total happiness. Parfit suggests that it would be better for us if we had symmetric attitudes to past and future pleasure and pain – if we levelled-up our emotional responses to past experiences. Then, a happy event would remain an object of excitement even when past, and we could look forward to an old age illuminated by the vivid glory of bygone pleasures.
Scheffler agrees that future bias is difficult to rationalise, but finds temporal neutrality distinctly unappealing. He argues that the temporally neutral agent will struggle to form and maintain valuable friendships – that they may even be constitutionally incapable of friendship. In making his case, Scheffler draws on a stock of pragmatic, quotidian observations. He points out, for example, that future-biassed individuals will reliably ‘look forward’ to seeing their friends, and so will actively seek them out, whereas the temporally neutral agent is liable to lack motivation to seek out future encounters once they have a stock of good friendship experiences to enjoy retrospectively.
More broadly, Scheffler warns that future bias makes an important contribution to human meaning. It is ‘woven into the fabric of human life’ (p. 59). To remove it would make us unrecognisable to ourselves. We should not recklessly wish it away. Rather, we should address it as an instance of a larger, and admittedly puzzling, feature of our condition: namely, that we tend to adopt many asymmetric attitudes towards our pasts and futures. The challenge, as Scheffler sees it, is not necessarily to overcome these asymmetries, but to understand the contribution they make to our being the sorts of creatures that we are and to scrutinise their role in the production of value.
The next chapter (3) continues in this vein. It addresses the fact that our emotional attitudes seem to undergo changes with the passage of time. These changes can seem both apt and puzzling. Drawing on work by Berislav Marušić (On the Temporality of Emotions, 2022) and others, Scheffler makes a case study of grief. Why should my feeling of grief at the death of a loved one diminish over time, even though my reason to grieve (my beloved is dead!) remains unchanged? Perhaps I can tell myself a story in which my grief is replaced by apt successor attitudes. But I still confront a normative challenge: that of convincing myself, or making it so, that I am not disloyal to my beloved. Even as I reassure myself that leading my life requires ‘moving on’, I will want to know that my diminishing pain does not correspond to a diminishing care for the dead – to a fading recognition of their life and its significance. But this remains a persistent anxiety.
These reflections bring Scheffler and his reader face-to-face, in Chapter 4, with the problem of ‘temporal dissonance’: namely, how am I, a persisting creature, to make sense of the fact that so little of my life exists in the present, and that so much of it lies out of reach? Contemplating the distant realms of past and future brings intriguing practical and epistemic asymmetries into relief: we know our past, but can no longer act upon it; we act upon our future, but know it not. Scheffler attends to the ways in which these asymmetries inform the lived temporality of human life, shaping what it means to inhabit life’s successive stages. In old age, for instance, we find ourselves with less to do and more to remember than those with fewer years under their belt. Eventually, we also tend to find ourselves with more dead than living friends – and it is to this predicament that Scheffler turns next.
Chapter 5 is concerned with friendships that end through the death of one party. Scheffler calls these ‘archived relationships’. It’s a jarring terminological choice, but one that functions to highlight the way in which issues of loss and retrieval dominate the afterlives of friendships. In Scheffler’s account, ‘the old’ are those who have a preponderance of archived relationships. The old are also, and thereby, those who characteristically face a problem of ‘normative poverty’ (even, dramatically, a ‘normative vacuum’). For, the deprivation of meaningful relationships is a deprivation of value. People confronted by normative poverty may seek to redress the problem either by (1) forming new relationships, or by (2) continuing to respond to the normative reasons generated by the archived relationships (engaging, for example, in commemorative activities). But problems loom for both approaches. With respect to (1), Scheffler worries that a too-hasty search for subsequent friendships expresses a sort of disloyalty to the person who has passed – a morally unseemly belief that they are ‘fungible’. With regard to (2), he notes that the reasons to act that are generated by archived relationships are generally insufficient to fill a life with valuable activity, and that, moreover, there is something perverse about ‘living in the past’. So perhaps, Scheffler concludes, the best (but still admittedly unsatisfactory) thing to do is to attempt a combination of both approaches.
Scheffler’s account of the worry about disloyalty marked one of the few points in the book in which I wasn’t gripped by the obvious plausibility of his psychological and normative insight. Why should we be suspicious of people who are quick to develop new friendships after the death of a friend? We are not suspicious of people with many concurrent friendships, so why engage in moral scrutiny of those who continue to fill the cup? To the extent that people tend to look askew at those who make new friends in late life (if indeed people do tend to look askew): isn’t doing so miserly and grotesque? Shouldn’t we be happy when the bereaved find ways to share in the store of normative affluence? It’s worth noting too, although it is beyond the scope of Scheffler’s project, that the problem of normative poverty is not merely a problem for the individuals who undergo it. It is socially, as well as prudentially, undesirable for older people to live lives of diminished social connection and activity and to become less invested in projects that engage them with the needs and goods of community. As natural as it might seem to slip into quietism about our lives getting quieter, it’s arguably not a prosocial path, and that alone might present sufficient reason to treat the option to ‘live in the past’ as untoward.
This review only surveys a small range of the many rich mysteries and insights charted in this wonderful book. But it feels fitting to end on the subject of loneliness and normative poverty, for, in addition to its many philosophical virtues, the book is an ameliorative to both. It does something that all great humane works of art do. It acts as a source of consolation. A reminder, that whatever this strange human condition is (and whatever ‘condition my condition is in’, to invoke another great humanist thinker), we are not alone in it.
