Most people want their lives to be meaningful. Over thirty years of studying and teaching philosophy, I’ve discovered that it’s not an easy issue to grapple with, since there are countless ways to come at this issue. The standard way to think about meaningfulness is to focus on the content of the goals that one pursues in life. So, we’re used to people saying things like “doesn’t a meaningful life require that you do this or reject that” where those things are outcomes like fame, riches, devotion to God, personal relationships, and so on. These issues about what to focus on are important, but another way of approaching the issue that I’ve recently become more attracted to involves thinking about the way in which a person approaches the goals that are important to them, as opposed to thinking about which goals they should have.
In thinking about this issue, I’ve been influenced by a number of figures, such as Montaigne and Emerson, but the biggest influences come from Nietzsche and from Daoism (Daodejing, most specifically). Both, in their own distinctive ways, give their readers a lot to think about when it comes to the importance of remaining open to and affirming of the diversity of both the world and oneself as a way of pursing one’s life goals. Though neither uses the term “meaningful,” both point to such a life as filled with vitality, passion, and energy, and in contrast they point to lives that lack those features as degraded, empty, coercive, and often filled with hatred and resentment. In what follows, I’d like to try to give this overall view a articulate shape and explain what strikes me as important about it to consider.
Nietzsche discusses this approach to life in many places, but one interesting passage comes from the Gay Science, section §295. He begins:
Brief habits. — I love brief habits and consider them an inestimable means for getting to know many things and states, down to the bottom of their sweetness and bitternesses; my nature is designed entirely for brief habits, even in the needs of my physical health and altogether as far as I can see at all— from the lowest to the highest. I always believe that here is something that will give me lasting satisfaction—brief habits, too, have this faith of passion, this faith in eternity—and that I am to be envied for having found and recognized it; and now it nourishes me at noon and in the evening and spreads a deep contentment all around itself and deep into me so that I desire nothing else, without having any need for comparisons, contempt or hatred.
One way to think of what Nietzsche is talking about is to consider what happens when we take on a specific goal in life. When that goal is an authentic expression of some collection of features that make you what you are, you experience potency, or power, or exhilaration – a passionate connection with life itself. In addition, when driven by this goal, you unavoidably cultivate a way of experiencing - a habit – that sees the world and the self through its unique lens.
Examples of this are easy to come by. For a person pursuing devotion to God, the world tends to light up with the sacred and the profound; for the aspiring writer, the world take on a poetic structure. In addition, a habit also recasts the features of your own self, in those examples as sacred, impure, disordered, or even lyrical. Through the habit, the world and the self are experienced in a way that lights them up with a particular type of significance. When you have “habits”, things matter. Well, that’s good, since a meaningful life should contain what matters!
Still, it’s important to note that Nietzsche doesn’t just endorse habits, but rather what he calls brief habits. The phrase is misleading, as it is not necessarily focused on how long a goal should be pursued, but rather with how we understand that goal in terms of time. To see what this means we need to start with Nietzsche’s reminder that as selves, we change. Nothing lasts forever. As a consequence, the feeling of passionate connection that we felt about a particular path or goal can begin to degrade and become artificial if one’s unique characteristics cease to be expressed by it. Nietzsche continues:
But one day its time is up; the good things part from me, not as something that has come to nauseate me but peacefully and sated with me as I am with it—as if we had reason to be grateful to each other as we shook hands to say farewell. Even then something new is waiting at the door, along with my faith—this indestructible fool and sage! — that this new discovery will be just right, and that this will be the last time. That is what happens to me with dishes, ideas, human beings, cities, poems, music, doctrines, ways of arranging the day, and life styles.
Nietzsche is stressing here that a habit, or way of approaching goals (and life) is brief when we can embrace its potential (or even likely) temporary nature. Consequently, when we sense that “time is up” for the habit (we have changed, it’s time to have a new goal) we are not sad. Instead, we respond to the loss of that self with gratitude (there’s a nice linkage here with Buddhism). In the spirit of gratitude, Nietzsche thinks that you instead turn your attention to the next opportunity - to the next brief habit you can form, to the next set of diverse experiences with which you can passionately engage.
But the ability to let go once it is time to depart from a goal is not the only feature of a brief habit. Instead, what Nietzsche appears to think is that we must have the ability to let it go in the midst of actually pursuing the goal itself. There’s a bit of tragedy and paradox mixed together here. Specifically, he thinks that brief habits must contain two elements at once – a feeling that “this time I’ve found the goal!” while at the same time an awareness that the time may come to depart from this specific way of engaging with life. Surely, the ability to push oneself forward in such a way is not easy to do.
Clearly, if a person can acknowledge that their goal may need to be one day “let go” it makes it easier to one day do just that. But this is not, in my view, the main reason why Nietzsche is promoting this perspective on how to engage with goals. To see what this extra dimension implies, it helps me to think of Daoism. Specifically, in Chapter 28 of the Daodejing, Laozi urges us to “know the male, but safeguard the female.” My reading of this claim is that while a determinate and specific “path” forward in life is natural (the “male”), it is best to do this while remaining open (the “female”) to the alternative paths that were (and always are) present.
Why does this matter? On my reading, when we push forward with a specific goal but fail to “safeguard the female” the habit that we form, which highlights the world in a specific way, cannot help but deface, demean, and devalue parts of the world and oneself. On the contrary, Nietzsche says that a brief habit finds value in itself, not in the way it contrasts or compares with other things, and so it lacks hatred or contempt. Sadly, this is not the way our goals typically work. Usually, our pursuit of a goal includes the (comparing and contrasting) belief that other alternative goals are contemptable, wrong, without value, and useless. A person with such a habit will divide the world and the self into the parts that have value, and parts that are useless.
I agree with Nietzsche and Laozi that when this happens, things go wrong in terms of meaning. For the Daoist, we fail to “safeguard the female” and become judgmental, and so predictably become aggressive and coercive towards the world by forcing it to take on the right character. For Nietzsche, the same is true, but we can importantly add to this that we start to hate – not just the features of the world that “oppose” our goal, but also the parts of ourselves that are viewed in a similar way (and that appear in tension with that goal). In the end, such a way of engaging with life leaves us entirely closed off from the diversity of experience that composes the world, and from the diversity of qualities that make up who and what we are.
Interestingly, this comes full circle to affect how we deal with change. Since we devalue and possibly even hate what the habit associated with that goal highlights negatively, we cannot view the goal itself as possibly temporary. After all, that would mean, in taking up another goal, embracing what is contemptible or worthy of hatred! So, if the time comes for the goal to change, because we have changed, we cannot show gratitude. Instead, we grieve, and we resist, and we can’t let it go. But yet this is exactly what a well-lived life may require at times. Opposite the brief habit that sees itself as simply one way to experience the world amidst many open possibilities, and so disposing us toward flexible life engagement, we end up with what Nietzsche calls enduring habits. He continues:
Enduring habits I hate, and I feel as if a tyrant had come near me and as if the air I breathe had thickened when events take such a turn that it appears that they will inevitably give rise to enduring habits; for example, owing to an official position, constant association with the same people, a permanent domicile, or unique good health. Yes, at the very bottom of my soul I feel grateful to all my misery and bouts of sickness and everything about me that is imperfect, because this sort of thing leaves me with a hundred backdoors through which I can escape from enduring habits.
Nietzsche’s (and Laozi’s) portrait here is very enticing to me. Perhaps we took a job and then lost excitement for it, or live in the same place for a long time and lose our connection with it. Or you had a way of thinking that now feels outdated. These things happen to all of us. When we form brief habits, we always remain importantly open to the validity of the goals and outlooks and projects that we did not choose. Given this affirmation, change is possible. When we form enduring habits, we cannot let go, and our lives become not only full of hate, but full of emptiness, since the goal no longer reflects who and what we are. We resist change.
In a flash of interesting insight - Nietzsche even suggests that health itself can (and should) be engaged as a brief habit. Of course, we think – shouldn’t health be an enduring habit? Nietzsche says no; if it is a brief habit, one remains open to the validity and worth of even sickness as a mode of experiencing; after all, do we not owe certain aspects of who we are to such factors? Does not sickness lead us to see things in ways that we find worthwhile? Pursuing health, he is suggesting, is no barrier to maintaining gratitude towards one’s sicknesses. Health as an enduring habit sees any sickness as without redeeming value, a feature of oneself and the world to be eradicated (there’s an important point to be drawn here about ableism, and its connection with views of disability, but that’s another topic). Brief habits are ultimately self-affirmative in their nature.
Interestingly, though - enduring habits are not the worst thing in Nietzsche’s opinion. He ends the brief passage with a final point:
Most intolerable, to be sure, and the terrible par excellence would be for me a life entirely devoid of habits, a life that would demand perpetual improvisation. That would be my exile and my Siberia.
If habits are really about ways of directing or navigating oneself through life that highlight the world and oneself with particular shades of significance, then in Nietzsche’s view (and I think also, Daoists’) brief habits are best, because they keep affirmation and gratitude for the diversity of life at the forefront, making a person’s navigation through life maximally open-minded and flexible. A life filled with enduring habits also is filled with goals, but ones that highlight the world and oneself partly in terms of what is contemptible and worthy of hate or as requiring aggressive coercion (to force it into just the right shape).
But worst of all are no habits at all. Such an existence is one that highlights nothing at all as having any significance; it is a nihilistic existence that has no habits from which to paint the world with meaning in any way at all. Such an existence is, Nietzsche thinks, no life at all.
Thanks, Chris. How do you account for the unique satisfaction of having "stuck with it" on a pursuit even when it grinds on us existentially, when we feel alienated from it, etc.? I suppose brief habits as I am understanding the concept are a state of mind in relation to our pursuits, with time ("brief") only serving as a kind of shorthand for authenticity. One can stick with a dead-end job over the decades by not over-investing in it, valuing the income it brings to one's family, spending nights and weekends on passion pursuits, etc. I feel like Nietzsche leaves room for this possibility by finding perpetual improvisation to be even ghastlier than enduring habits, as you mention.
In this sense, self-discipline or "stick-to-it-iveness" when passion is lacking is a kind of sentinel watching over the encroachment of the to-be-avoided-at-all-costs improvisational attitude. We may however deploy this sentinel at the expense of other feelings and this leads to our enduring habit, this hammering away over the decades at a square peg on a round hole for the sake of something we cannot any longer authentically identify. But of course, the mindset is malleable along with the pursuit and maybe this is the point I would like to explore. And the contemptible hammering is preferable to never fully committing to a swing. Thanks again, enjoying these posts. (Will/formerly Brett)