Ultimate Questions (Bryan Magee)
OVERVIEW
“Ultimate Questions” by philosopher Bryan Magee is, at its core, a meditation on whether humans can answer life’s biggest questions: “Why is there something instead of nothing?” “To what end is all life moving?” “What is the meaning of existence?”
Magee doesn’t speculate on possible answers, but instead devotes “Ultimate Questions” to articulating why we absolutely cannot answer these questions.
Problem 1
Our first problem is that to answer the big “everything” questions, we’d need to get a perspective outside of everything. But, inescapably, “in our attempts to understand the universe we cannot get outside the universe. In our attempts to understand the empirical world we cannot get outside the empirical world. In our attempts to understand ourselves as human beings we cannot get outside ourselves as human beings.” It’s simply not possible to understand everything without escaping the everything to some outside perspective – a logical and intellectual impossibility.
Problem 2
Our second problem (if we could get around the first) is that we live incredibly short lives. Our lives are temporary, we so utterly provincial, our time slipping into an “ever-receding sliver of an ever-expanding history.” Magee says: “How can we, buried almost invisibly as we are in the ongoing processes of the universe – each of us here for only the flicker of an eyelid – hope to know even so much as what there is to be understood, let alone understand it?” The life of any single person is far too short to intellectually master even one iota of the “big questions.”
In addition, human civilization hasn’t been around long enough to allow us any sort of penetrating depth as a collective. On this brevity, Magee presents this wonderful example: imagine centenarians, persons living to be 100 or older, with overlapping lives stretching back to the dawn of human civilization. Incredibly, “the whole of civilization has occurred within the successive lifetimes of sixty people.” Twenty centenarian lifetimes takes you back to Jesus, twenty-one to Julius Caesar. The Renaissance is only half a dozen people away. “Each of those great empires that so imposingly rose, flourished and fell did so during the overlapping lives of a handful of individuals, usually fewer than half a dozen. So we ourselves are still near the beginning of the entire story.” How could we ever understand a book after having read only the first line?
Problem 3
Let’s imagine that human civilization has existed for 2 million years (instead of only 6,000), and our life expectancy now numbers in the thousands of years. Could we answer life’s ultimate questions then? Still no, says Magee, and that’s because the apparatus we humans have for apprehending the universe will always be restricted. Discoverable truths about the world are only discoverable to us if they are something we can sense. “We acquire a world-picture that exists entirely in terms of what can be seen, heard, felt, tasted, and smelt; plus what can be thought, inferred, remembered, recorded, postulated, conjectured, intuited, invented, calculated, and the rest; plus what can be put together out of these things, and what can be imagined from them, as if reality itself were like what our apparatus is capable of doing.” We have no apprehension of the world that exists outside our senses, and if a concept cannot be conveyed in pictures or language, it cannot ever be apprehended by us. If you are sitting in a quiet room right now, you may apprehend silence. But everywhere all around you and through you are radiowaves that contain symphonies and rock music and people speaking in Dutch and German and French. But you don’t have the receiver for these radiowaves (unless you turn on your radio), so your apprehension is one of silence. We are limited by the apparatus we have for experiencing reality – there will always be things we cannot know (and therefore questions we cannot answer) because we are simply not equipped to perceive them. Magee’s opinion is that most of reality is unknowable by us. Even if we lived forever, and even if we could somehow get outside everything to understand it, we still wouldn’t have the full picture – we perceive only a tiny sliver of reality.
Magee concludes:
“What I find myself wanting to press home more than anything else is that the only honest way to live and think is in the fullest possible acknowledgement of our ignorance and its consequences, without ducking out into a faith, whether positive or negative, and without any other evasions or self-indulgences.”
WHAT NOW? (actions for mortal atheists)
Even if there were answers to life’s ultimate questions, we are too temporal, our civilization too young, and our minds and bodies too limited to find them. Even if all that weren’t true, it’s still logically impossible to understand everything, or to know toward what ultimate end all life may be moving. My only “what now” from this book is to let yourself off the hook. You’re better off convincing yourself you need don’t answers to life’s ultimate questions.
IN SUM:
Is this book entirely secular? Yes.
If I had to describe the book in one sentence? Ponderings about the unanswerability of life’s big questions.
Who should read this book? Those with too generous expectations about our potential to answer big questions.