● Ask a man why he uses exercise; he will answer, because he desires to keep his health. If you then enquire, why he desires health, he will readily reply, because sickness is painful. If you push your enquires farther, and desire a reason why he hates pain, it is impossible he can ever give any. This is an ultimate end, and is never referred to any other object. ... Something must be desirable on its own account, and because of its immediate accord or agreement with human sentiment and affection.
DAVID HUME (1711~1776),An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals,p.293
Introduction
In "An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals", philosopher David Hume states that humans' ultimate desire is to not experience any pain. His logic behind devising such an answer is that "Something must be desirable on its own account, and because of its immediate accord or agreement with human sentiment and affection," and that a man's final answer as to the reason why he decides to commit or abstain from certain actions will always be to avoid pain.
In this essay, I will analyze the reasoning behind Hume's definition of the "ultimate end" as the desire to avoid pain. I believe that this statement can be rephrased to all beings wanting to avoid unnecessary pain, i.e., pain without reason, the logic of which will be explained further on. In doing so, I will expound upon his examples as well as provide my own in order to reach the conclusion that I have reached. Furthermore, I will be exploring the connection between Hume's philosophy and Aristotle's chief good, which he believes to be happiness. I will also provide reasoning in regards to why Aristotle's chief good is unattainable. Finally, I will elaborate on how those two definitions can interact with each other to discover the true meaning of human life, and provide my own beliefs and values about it in the process of doing so.
I. Hume
Hume begins with the example of a man who exercises. When asked why he does so, he will answer that he desires to keep his health. When asked why he desires to keep his health, the man will reply that sickness is painful. Through this brief imaginary exchange, Hume leads us to the conclusion that the man who exercises must hate pain. And, ultimately, when he is asked why he hates pain, he will be unable to give any further explanation. This Hume considers to be the ultimate end: the goal that every human being born into life must be continually working towards, because there is nothing that pain can ultimately give back.
However, the man who exercises ultimately endures pain in his effort to avoid it. Exercise, though it brings about multiple beneficial results such as happiness and physical health, is difficult in its process. Simply running can leave someone out of breath and feeling as if their lungs are being torn apart, but playing competitive sports is profoundly challenging because athletes must also handle the extreme psychological pressure and stress that comes hand-in-hand with competitions while they simultaneously push their body beyond its limits. It is extremely natural to want to bring home a gold medal to your country, team, or family, so the average athlete endures the pain that comes with heavy exercise and sports competitions in order to feel the satisfaction of doing so.
According to Hume, on the other hand, the purpose of athletes choosing to endure physical and mental pain is because they want to avoid the very same thing. Once the pain they live through while training and while competing with others and the pain of returning home a failure is compared, the latter is often considered worse. Being consistent in training means a higher chance to win; avoiding training because of fear of temporary pain results in greater agony and even acute shame. The fundamental motivation of athletes in giving up physical and mental comfort is not, then, to bring home the gold medal, but to escape the greater evil.
Both a professional athlete and the man who exercises are willing to clench their teeth and endure the "lesser evil"; the pain, that when weighed against countless consequences that stem from choosing to avoid that pain, seems microscopic. Returning to Hume's example, the man who exercises may become out of breath and his knees may ache once he runs. However, if he does not exercise because he does not want to experience the agony of running, he will grow unhealthy. Once he becomes unhealthy, it is nigh impossible to regain lost health. He will have to pour thousands of dollars into
healthcare and the correct treatment for his ailments and be in pain that is incomparable to what he felt during exercising. Therefore, he exercises: on the surface level, he wants to stay healthy, and this is the answer he gives Hume. Beneath the tip of the iceberg, though, lies the answer that he has algorithmically selected the best course of action to avoid the greatest pain of all.
It cannot be said, then, that the man who exercises "hates pain". After all, if he is willing to endure certain amounts of it to divert a crisis looming in his future, surely he doesn't despise it. The man who exercises hates pain without reason. The pain he knows in exercise has a clear purpose - to keep himself healthy. However, the pain he knows in sickness has no purpose. It is just there to torture him, a consequence of his unwillingness to exercise. What reward does enduring the agony of sickness give him? Nothing, which is precisely why he exercises to avert it.
For example, take the average student. To an outsider not well-acquainted with the affairs of the world as they are now, what they put themself through would not make any sense. They subject themself to the boredom of sitting at a desk for hours each day listening to a teacher speak about matters that are largely irrelevant to their life in the world. The alien wonders why the student listens to a lecture about trigonometry when it is clearly not used in their day-to-day life, and why they go home and study it further.
However, the alien soon learns that the student studied trigonometry in their homes because of a few numbers they bring back: test scores of 100. It would mean nothing to the alien, and to them, the hours of listless reviewing that the student put themself through would be seen as pain without reason, the very thing that Hume believed all humans should live to avoid.
Nevertheless, we as persons acquainted with the state of the world that the trigonometry review was not for nothing, and the test score the student brought home means more than simple numbers. The test score may translate directly to their future and how they are perceived and living in the world in the future. Therefore, to the student, the hours spent on mathematics is not truly pain without reason, especially if they received a satisfactory grade.
Let me introduce a much more dramatic example, keeping the question of how far we can look into the bliss of the future to inflict pain on ourselves now. Say that if the same student studying trigonometry were to cut off their left hand and live with only their right hand for the rest of their life, their exam scores for the rest of their years in academia would be guaranteed to be excellent. It is clear that this is not the pain without reason that Hume thought we should avoid - however, the student would not choose to cut off their left hand. The reasoning behind this is simple: the inconvenience that they will have to endure in the future is much more than what can be aided or rewarded by perfect test scores. They would have to live with not only the pain that comes with first cutting off their hand, then with the discomfort of living without one. They would not be able to type properly, read a book, or shower, and would have to re-learn all basic living procedures so they could complete menial tasks with just one hand. Even if, through their test scores, their admission into a prestigious university and then a stable job was guaranteed, they would not cut off their hand.
Life, according to my explanation of Hume's conclusion, is a delicate balancing act between two evils, one lesser and one greater. We decide through our own morals and maxims what we can put ourselves through and what we can't for the safety and happiness of ourselves in the future, however far or near it may be. In the end, it is we who choose between living our life in the happiest way now, or being subject to pain now in the hope that it would lead to happiness thereafter.
However, it is a difficult process, and to most, avoiding unnecessary pain does not seem as a good enough reason to continue living. After all, there are multiple ways now to die painlessly - what would be the point of extending life only to stumble upon choices that become harder and harder, especially seeing that the choice is not between unstained bliss and complete evil but rather between one kind of pain and another. It makes more sense to choose an easy way out while we still can and avoid enduring pain in itself. At this point, people would discard Hume's philosophy and turn to Aristotle, whose chief good is defined as happiness.
II. Aristotle
Immediate similarities can be drawn with Aristotle's notion of the chief good, happiness, and Hume's thoughts on the ultimate end, avoiding pain without reason. Aristotle and Hume take much of the same path to arrive at different conclusions - however, avoiding unnecessary pain and being happy are two sides of the same coin. Avoiding pain and being happy are both stand-alone desires: as Hume states, we cannot really answer why we want to be happy or why we want not to be in pain. And, in a similar fashion, the two ultimate ends or chief goods, which I will regard as interchangeable terms but will refer to as an ultimate end, are related to each other. We are happy if we are not in pain; we are not in pain if we are happy.
However, unlike Hume's ultimate end, Aristotle's ideal of happiness is extremely difficult to achieve. The most important quality of his happiness is the criteria that all who are considered happy must be virtuous, or only feel happiness through committing virtuous acts. For this reason, he claims, children cannot be happy because they do not know virtue or what constitutes it until they are significantly older. Though, this definition of happiness, albeit honorable, does not correlate with the experiences we have all had as children. The simple and undeniable fact of the matter is that we are happier as children. Adults will become lost in nostalgia so often, recalling the times that they lived through as a young man or woman: "Those were the good old days", they'll say. And although they may reluctantly or readily admit that the world has gotten to be a better place to live in as they grew up, they will never lose that wistfulness that they harbor for the times when they were blissfully ignorant to the atrocities of the world.
Furthermore, some may even find happiness in immorality. What if a student finds happiness in skipping class to go meet a dear friend? What if a social media addict believes they are happy when they lie about their life on Instagram? What if a murderer feels bliss in killing people? Decidedly, these are acts that cannot be seen as virtuous or recommended, but people still find happiness through them.
Therefore, how can children not be happy, and how can people feel happy through committing less-than-virtuous acts? It can only be that Aristotle's very definition of happiness is a kind of "idea" that exists separately from the emotions that we feel. Crudely put, it is the difference between "fake happiness" and "real happiness". Real happiness only exists in the realm of idea, the unattainable chief good of Aristotle, and fake happiness is the gleeful emotion we feel on a day-to-day basis. Our emotions are the pieces of real happiness that we experience on account of having done something that makes us happy, while the idea of it exists locked away in our minds.
Although refusing to be in unnecessary pain and being happy may seem similar or even interchangeable, they are very different and cannot be regarded as the same according to the the interpretation of Aristotle's happiness that I have put forward.
III. The Reason
Then, what is the ultimate goal that we spend all of our lives trying to achieve? If it is absurd to continue life with just the thought of avoiding unnecessary pain, which can be avoided by not being alive at all in the first place, and if the happiness we can rarely feel is fake and unreliable, what must we live for? What is the meaning of life? Why were we born? Could it be that there is no meaning and no purpose behind our creation and birth here on Earth at all?
Though it seems like a convenient conclusion and an easy way out to such a difficult and possibly even groundbreaking question, my reply is that the final reason for our existence is not something that is ultimately definable by any number of great thinkers, and that it truly does not matter if our happiness is fake or real if we do feel it in the first place. In a way, fake happiness is much more real to us than Aristotle's real happiness is. It's the debris of that very idea that we experience in our daily lives, and we have never felt that it was lacking or a poor copy of "the real thing". We have never once thought that if we could just attain happiness in its true form, we would be able to leave the world behind without regrets. It is truly jolting to think that the emotions that sometimes control us are fakes; however, that discovery changes nothing.
The meaning of life is simple. It is different for everyone, and no one has given philosophers the right to even attempt to unite all different purposes into a single principle that is supposed to be the same for every living being. No matter how vast their knowledge is or how bright their moment of enlightenment, philosophers cannot rule out the simplest reasons that humans come up with in order to continue to see the next day, then the next, then the next. A woman who is suicidal does not have the same meaning of life or ultimate goal as a woman who is the heir of a company. One person may live to eat their next plate of pasta or listen to the next album of their favorite singer.
Another may live to become successful. Another may live to discover the secrets of the universe in a physics laboratory. Avoiding pain and eating pasta are both equally good reasons. This is what I mean when I say undefinable: no matter how deep we dig into the plate of pasta or the laboratory, people will always devise new reasons to continue life. Some may pursue happiness as their final goal and some may not, but who are we to decide the validity of their individual meanings? Can we even tell someone teetering on the edge of a precipice that they can't live just because they want to watch the next episode of their favorite TV show, because it isn't "something desirable on its own account"?
In truth, meaning is something that we find over and over and over each day, and we do not need one to justify the reason for our existence and the space we take up. Our life does not need meaning to become meaningful, and there is no ultimate end or chief good that we need to reach so that we may depart this plane of existence thinking that we have done our part.
IV. Conclusion
I have begun the essay by analyzing Hume's claim that avoidance of pain is the ultimate end of all human beings, then rephrased it to avoidance of pain without reason, or unnecessary pain, based on my evaluation and through the providing of multiple examples. Then, I elaborated on the connection between Hume's ultimate end and Aristotle's chief good as happiness. However, I was also able to prove that the happiness humans feel was fake happiness, and the real happiness that Aristotle had defined as unattainable without virtue was a perfect ideal of it that only existed in the realm of idea. I claimed that the emotion of happiness that we felt on a day-to-day basis was simply the pieces of that idea that we caught upon committing acts that would make us happy.
However, I had ruled out both ultimate goals in human life in the process. Avoiding unnecessary pain had an easier solution of simply dying to never come face-to-face with the choice of having to choose between two different kinds of pain but pain nonetheless. Real happiness was impossible and fake happiness was fragile and temporary where no true eternal bliss could be found. I then asked what could be the true meaning of life if two great philosophers could not find it, eventually arriving upon the conclusion that there was no meaning to life that could be reconciled into one united principle.
The meaning of life is not a riddle to be solved nor a question to be answered. It is the simplest thing to find, though not many look where they should in the erroneous assumption that it must be grand and worthy enough to validate and justify their places and what they have done both in and to the world. As of 4:02 PM on January 8th, 2022, a peaceful Saturday afternoon as the sky bleeds into colors of the evening, my meaning in life is that I have written an essay that I am proud of and that encapsulates the philosophy that permeates my life and the reason for my existence.
I have decided that the very next meaning of my life will be eating something good for dinner.
Writer : Nahye Lee
High School : Chadwick Songdo International School
University : Brown University
행복한 에세이네! 꼭 살아가는데 힘들여서 'grand'한 의미를 찾아야하는가? 우리 주변에 소소하고 확실한 행복들도 널려있는데! 거기에서 매일매일 즐겁게 살아가면 되는 것이지. 흄이던 아리스토던 그들이 말하는 '삶의 궁극의 목적'은 찾을래야 찾을 수도 없는것 같고, 나 스스로 삶에 주인이 되어서 '의미있게' 살면 된다는 에세이네! 그런가?